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Some may debate whether Groupon is good or bad for businesses, but one thing that’s unquestionable is its ability to generate an enormous amount of exposure. In larger cities, Groupon’s subscriber list tends to be measured in the hundreds of thousands, and their morning emails are more than capable of flooding the featured company’s website with visitors.

So what exactly can you expect from Groupon? One of our clients was recently featured on the deal-of-the-day site, here’s what we observed:

• Nearly 10,000 visitors were sent to the site as a direct result of the promotion

• More than half the visits to the site happened before 11am

• 15% of the visitors to the site were using a mobile device

• At the peak, 2-3 pages were being served per second

• Groupon users tended to view nearly twice as many pages per visit than typical users

• Excluding the home page, 70% of the page views were to view product information

• The next most frequently visited pages were FAQs and contact information

• 80% of visitors arrived via the first link in the email

If you’re considering offering a promotion through Groupon it’s critical to ensure your site is prepared in order to make the most of the opportunity. Groupon’s morning email will catch people’s attention and send them to your website, but it’s your site’s job to close the deal and convince them to buy.

So what should you do to prepare your site?

1. Make sure your site is up to dealing with all the extra traffic. While most sites won’t have any issues here, it’s not unheard of for a site to be knocked offline. Use a service such as Load Impact to test your website ahead of time and make sure it can handle the load. Their free testing level is more than adequate to ensure your site will survive the onslaught.

 

2. Ensure your site is optimized for – or at least usable on – mobile browsers. Users will be visiting your site from their phones early in the morning. Their mobile experience is going to be influencing their first impressions of your business. If your site loads quickly and they’re able to easily find what they’re looking for, they’ll be much more likely to buy.

 

3. Make sure you have detailed product information on your website. Even if you don’t normally have this information on your site, add a temporary page with detailed product information for Groupon users. You may also want to consider adding a FAQ page specifically for Groupon visitors to help minimize the number of phone calls you have to field.

 

4. You’ll be given an opportunity to review and approve the email Groupon will send on your behalf. When doing this don’t just focus on the copy, make sure the links are all going to the most appropriate pages. In particular, make sure the the first link goes to your home page or to another appropriate landing page.

Website aside, here are a couple more general tips for making your Groupon promotion a success:

1. Try to structure your deal to turn a profit on its own, don’t treat it as a loss leader which will hopefully pay off in the future. Offering $60 for $30? You’ll keep $15 after Groupon’s cut. Consider your gross margins and make your offer as appealing as possible while ensuring it generates a profit on the average sale.

 

2. Be sure your staff is ready for an influx on the day the promotion is announced, they’ll be fielding dozens of phone calls from potential customers. If you have a retail presence, expect record numbers of window shoppers checking things out.

 

3. For most, Groupon will be an experiment. Being able to measure the results is a must. Know ahead of time how you’re going to track and report on sales to Groupon customers. At a minimum you’ll want to determine the average gross sale, and what percentage are first-time customers. That you do this is more important than how it’s done. If it comes down to it, have your staff write it down after each sale and compile the information later.

 

The main reason for offering a promotion with Groupon is invariably the massive exposure and potential to gain new, repeat customers. Still, when done properly there’s no reason a well designed promotion can’t turn a profit from the get-go.

Nick Oostveen is the President of Gravit-e Technologies, a Vancouver-based company which develops custom web applications and other large-scale websites. Gravit-e specializes in developing systems to help small, rapidly growing companies scale by automating inefficient and time consuming manual processes. (more…)