“There’s an awful lot of attention going on around the consumer, while virtually leaving the small business owner out. We’re powering the other side of that equation.”

Hundreds of millions of consumers spend their time on utility apps in mobile maps, localized search and shopping tools, on specialized social local apps, while waves of new local shopping apps call for their attention: witness Groupon Now, ScoutMob, Yipit, SCVNGR. Mobile wallets are about to increase the noise even further – essentially creating another new localized marketing channel disguised as a convenient payment tool.

But where is the merchant amid all this noise and excitement?

Business Behavior: Leaning forward with a furrowed brow
For the most part, merchants are sitting on the side of the pool, perhaps with one toe in the water, but mostly they are dazed and confused by the pace of change and plethora of choices. The concept appeals, but they are confused about how best to invite this live mobile consumer to visit or transact.

What they are doing is intensely watching the activity, as their competitors and neighbors do Daily Deals, as they adopt social marketing and as they begin to test new location-based specials.

At Closely, we’ve spent over a year working with and watching small businesses iterate their way through first generation deals, loyalty products and mobile promotion. One thing really stood out.

Searching for the Lost Feeling of Control

The consistent emotion that is visible with small business owners is feeling out of control – a lot of this is a function of the limited time they have to learn and keep up, and the often visceral fear that their competitors may be getting a leg up on them.

We took this reality to the product drawing board, and designed a new approach to drive small business engagement with Closely.

Soon, you’ll see us launch the first version of a new merchant mobile application.  The thinking behind how to engage with small business was captured in our recent guest editorial at Street Fight Magazine – essentially is boils down to this…

Deliver a live personalized stream about what is happening in the market and neighborhood of a business, all the time, at their fingertips – create an initial feeling of relief, followed by a growing desire to engage and control their performance.

Reward the user first, and then drive the opportunity for product engagement.

Business owner attention center on everyday interactions in their marketplace – about their customers, competitors and neighborhood activity patterns.  By informing the owner of the live mobile marketplace surrounding them, we start to knock down the barriers to participation.

Businesses need to be able to feel the vibe and get familiar with the everyday flow of promotions and incentives pulling consumers into action. Delivering this as a simple, valuable everyday mobile tool creates instant and lasting value.  From there, we’ll build product involvement.

Stay tuned, it’s going to be a fun new product direction for Closely!

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Closely proposes a model where media channels remain relevant when the small business needs the extra local distribution. Closely founder and CEO Perry Evans explored the big picture for small business in this new distribution environment in a guest column for Street Fight Mag.

Promotional commerce between small businesses and local consumers is undergoing a massive reconstruction. In the process, media channels are being forced to proactively adapt or wither into irrelevance.

In the old world, a business relied on a small number of trusted local media channels to package and deliver their promotions to local consumers, and spent what they could justify to convert these offers into visits and appointments. Media channels no longer enjoy the spoils of having critical mass in consumer reach and limited competition…

Read more at Street Fight Mag

Here are some highlights we’ve introduced to make Closely even better in 2012:

Agency Support

• Multiple Businesses: Create and manage profiles and campaigns for multiple client Businesses from a single Closely account.
• Multiple Team Members: Account Admins now have the ability to create Agent users to manage business profiles and promotions, allowing agency teams or partners to collaborate on client campaigns.

Enhanced Options for Businesses:

• Online-Only Business: E-commerce merchants or those without a storefront location may now upload discount codes for deal vouchers to be redeemed online.
• Bonus Days and Times: Deals can be optimized to stimulate business when you need it most by adding bonus values for redemption on particular days of the week or hours of the day.

Campaign Management:

• Improved Interface: Creating and managing campaigns is even easier with new tabbed organization for different promotion types.
• Post Scheduling and Repeating: Promotions can can now be distributed to Facebook and/or Twitter on repeating schedule to reach customers throughout the duration of the campaign. Successful campaigns can be easily revived from the Closely dashboard.
• Enhanced Analytics: Easily track and improve your campaigns with access to detailed statistics including total purchased, total viewed and sources of clicks.

Consumer Accounts:

• Consumer Account: Customers who purchase a Deal can log in from their own account to review and print their purchased voucher at any time.
• Improved Customer Voucher: Vouchers are easily printed as a PDF with a Google map to help them find the local business.
• Google+ Sharing: All Deal and Offer pages can be now shared by consumers with a click on the G+ button, joining Facebook, Twitter and Email in Closely’s social distribution.

Meet Pineapple Day Spa, an award winning spa located in Pine Bush, New York, a town of about 1,600 residents a ninety minute drive from the Big Apple. Pineapple Day Spa offers a range of services and products for wellness, beauty, and relaxation by a team of more than 15 highly trained stylists and therapists.

While the spa is located miles from the media centers of Manhattan, Pineapple Day Spa’s digital marketing presence is on par with the biggest and best salons in the country thanks to the innovative marketing services provided by its marketing agency, the gooroo group.

Pineapple Day Spa’s beautifully designed website offers booking functionality and allows customers to purchase gift certificates directly from the site. In the social media world, the spa now engages new and existing customers through an expanding network on both Facebook and Twitter, and an email list reaches subscribers with strategic updates and offers.

Economic Uncertainty

In 2011, as pre-purchased Deals were embraced by consumers across the country, Pineapple Day Spa saw potential for growing its own business. Like many smaller communities, the economic environment in Pine Bush has led to belt-tightening and reduced spending on percieved luxury items, including spa services. Allowing customers to pre-purchase services at a discount would help new customers overcome the perception of unafforability and allow them to experience the services worth coming back for — a proposition the spa found promising.

However, the major daily deal sites were not operating in smaller markets like Pine Bush, and providing deep discounts to NYC customers unlikely to make the long trip for a return visit at regular price was simply not an option for gooroo group’s strategy of creating long-term, loyal customers. Pineapple Day Spa and gooroo group needed to find an alternative to the big daily deal sites.

Discovering Closely

When gooroo group’s founder learned about Closely’s promotion application for small businesses in the fall of 2011, he was excited about the possibilities. In contrast to the blunt, broad-market options of major daily deal sites, Closely would allow the spa to run deals any time, set their own terms, and distribute the deal to the spa’s email list, social following and other locally targeted channels. The platform would serve as a tool to enhance gooroo group’s strategic marketing approach, not a one-size-fits-all distraction from the spa’s core customer base.

While the possiblities were appealing, the agency’s research showed that customers in more rural markets were far less likely to have purchased a daily deal than those in deal-saturated urban areas. Armed with this knowledge, they approached a new campaign with cautious optimism, developing a plan for a relatively conservative deal with a short duration and redemption time. Unlike the major daily deal sites, the Closely platform would allow this initial test and empower the agency to repeat or modify the approach as needed on a real-time basis.

The Deal

• The Offer: Buy the deal for $49, and get $70 worth towards any spa or salon treatment
• Discount: 30%
• Duration: 11/18/11 to 11/27/11 (redemption extended until 12/15/11)

Distribution

• Email: The gooroo group created an email marketing campaign to promote the redesigned website, including an extra incentive highlighting the Closely deal.

• Facebook: gooroo group shared the deal to the spa’s Facebook page, promoting sales and engagement from Pineapple Day Spa fans.

• Twitter: The deal was posted automatically via the Closely application on a repeating schedule carefully selected by gooroo group.

• Website: The Closely widget was easily embedded on the Special Offers of the spa’s site to capture site visitors looking for the most up-to-date offer information.

Results

The Pineapple Day Spa and gooroo group could not have been more pleased with the results when they reached their goal of 15 deals sold in 9 days.  Results and return on investment were easy to track using the Closely analytics dashboard.

Some highlights:

• 5% of customer who viewed the deal page bought the deal.
• 79% of views came from the email marketing campaign or web site
• 16.5% of views came from the social networks
• 4.5% came from search engines, thanks to an increased SEO footprint
• Immediate revenue generated: $735 (with 90% going to the gooroo group and the Pineapple Day Spa directly!)

The Pineapple Day Spa was very encouraged by the positive response from its customers – old and new – and has adopted the Closely application to run regular deals tailored to the unique needs of the business and its customers. The customer response has been 100% positive, with clients thanking the business for offering deals that make it affordable to pamper themselves in tough economic times.

Meanwhile, gooroo group was able to demonstrate that the pre-purchase deal model is not just for large, metropolitan markets.

A savvy marketing agency with a real connection to the business they serve, combined with the flexibility provided by the Closely platform, can transform the online marketing possibilites for small businesses in local markets.

More Info

More more information about how Closely can help you grow your business, contact info@closely.com

The gooroo group can be reached as follows:

Ryan DeJong, Founder
gooroo group
646.580.9717
info@gooroogroup.com
www.gooroogroup.com

Return shopping behavior is undergoing a sea change, as consumers begin to modify their shopping decision making. They are being conditioned to “check for promotions” before deciding on a particular product/service purchase.  Indeed, a consumer today can jump from Spa to Spa, from Restaurant to Restaurant, or from Cleaning Service to Cleaning Service, living off the growing inventory of Deals being continually published.

As a new gen of “live promotions” migrate into the mainstream, this behavior will further accelerate to a new norm in consumer shopping decisions. Just as Review content has become central to consumers shopping, Promotions will take their place as a key factor in final business selection.  Consumers shop based on quality and price.  Reviews have become the proxy for quality, and Promotion will become the proxy for communicating price.

The Wallet Bias Imperative

A small business can no longer rely solely on the quality of product and consumer experience to ensure return visit behavior, even by their traditionally loyal customers. This puts an acute new priority on leveraging the point of live interaction with customers to build bias for future return visit shopping decisions.

One approach we take with Loyalty engagement is to employ the point of “check-out interaction” to select and reward your most interesting consumers – the ones that the business wants as repeat customers.  Wallet Bias is the goal, as we leverage pre-purchased offers to secure a position of recall and preference when the consumer is ready for their next use of their product/service. Having a $20 value voucher in the consumer’s wallet can secure a bias towards your business, delivering more effective promotion impact than a generic Happy Hour standing offer.

The Increasingly Strategic Consumer Wallet

Today, Wallet Bias is a metaphor for achieving top-of-mind recall when a consumer is ready to decide in your product/service category.  In the not-too-distant future, this wallet will become a very tangible promotion distribution target.

In the rapidly approaching world of mobile wallets, the consumer will increasingly use smartphone apps for making purchases, and these apps could grow to become central to loyalty and promotion.  We need to think of this wallet not simply as a payment tool, but as a destination for targeted distribution of promotional offers. Imagine having a set of contextual recommendations “waiting for you in your wallet”.

To see the battle forming over this new app space, look no further than the news of the day!

The best early example I saw of the potential for a new generation of wallet applications was in the GroceryIQ app (acquired by Coupons.com) – designed to help you create your grocery list, the application automatically appends coupons for the identified products – and related ones!

Project this into the future, and you see a new battlefield in which consumers may come to activate and navigate their shopping actions via this new highly targeted promotion distribution channel.  To a merchant, the opportunity to target related purchase behavior, qualified by precise identity, location and time-based context is very compelling.

At Closely, We’re Already There!

We help today’s small business begin to shift their promotion plans into this emerging behavior of consumers.  Daily Deal campaign do nothing to secure return behavior, but the underlying concept of pre-purchased offers can be directly applied.  We’ve innovated in two directions here.

One, we’ve created a “Private Promotion” product – simply, it’s a way to target and deliver a return visit deal to individual consumers. The business owner can hand select the customers they want to return, and deliver a Return Visit purchase offer at the time of service completion or check-out.  There is no better time to secure return visit bias that at the completion of a good product/service experience.

Two, we’ve refined the promotion instrument to create smart everyday promotion programs.  We’ve provided a simple way to incent the best behavior (time/day patterns, for example, as seen below).

From a Best Practices viewpoint, we recommend designing return promotions to establish Wallet Bias.  The intent is not to replicate a Daily Deal, but simply to create a position that hooks the customer into a bias towards choosing you when they are ready to transact again. Lower price point return visit promotions can hook the desired return purchase behavior, and bonus time structures can give the business the confidence to use this as an everyday marketing tool.

Finding your place to top-of-mind recall and decision bias of your best customers (and the related social referral opportunities) is becoming central to a well deigned Business Promotion strategy.  Loyalty increasingly needs to be triggered, and it’s a new world where decision processes and tools are in motion.

If you’re not aiming here, you’ll simply be missing your customers.

We created an evolved Deal model, in which you set different values within one deal based on the preferred demand patterns of an individual business.  Our imaginations soared.  You could make it a sophisticated match between the times, days and seasons in which you really need new business activity – a true instrument of yield management. We have even designed a “live push” component, so that a business could reach out to customers and further entice them with instant additional incentive.

As things go with small businesses, simplicity trumps flexible but complex options, and new concepts demand a walk-before-you-run entry point. Our user research and design iterations have led us to simplify all this into one very understandable product feature, which we’re launching today.

Our Product News

We’re introducing the Bonus Value Deal. This label captures the 80-20 rule for entry point use cases. Businesses see real appeal in a simple 2-layered deal design that delivers a clear incentive for their customers to use their deals at designated Bonus Times.  And, when consumers use the deal during peak periods they are still rewarded, but not at the margin challenged levels most often forced onto them by Daily Deal providers.

This product feature continues to progress our theme of refining deals into everyday promotion tools that the business can use more universally than the brute-force norm of deep universal discounting.  To the consumer, it’s simple is execution, as highlighted below.

And to the business we have simplified creation with an optional add-on dialog as a business deal is designed.

This simple design is gaining great traction with business users who love the fundamental concept of Daily Deals, but hate the heavy-handed business model of first generation providers.

Of course, we will continue to leverage our original IP to expand the uses of variable value across a range of consumer activity patterns and live incentive publishing.  But we’re getting the yield management ball rolling with this freshly proven technique that businesses love!

Connecting Best Customers and Social Networks

Our product mission is to help small businesses stimulate demand in bold new ways via real-time and social media. Promotions can be published anytime, and can be distributed smartly in targeted ways to improve business performance.

We’ve extended social marketing well beyond the obvious methods with Facebook and Twitter.  These “social gestures” signal familiarity and receptivity, and form a great new approach to creating your own audience.  However, this model fails to capture the value of a known customer, especially when it can be coupled with known purchase behavior.

Cranking Up the ROI Deal Campaigns

Closely recently launched Social Select, designed to drive the right return visit behavior from your best visitors and customers.  Social Select addresses the single biggest complaint of merchants with Daily Deals – the poor performance in return visit behavior of a deal’s trial customers.  Daily Deals deliver leads and walk away.

I’m pleased to report that merchants love the combo of Social Select and Daily Deals!  Coupling the two into an integrated model of campaign + conversion drives an increased ROI and converts a burst of leads into a social marketing asset.

What Makes a Best Customer?

As merchants began to use Social Select, it’s been fascinating to see an increasing creativity in deal design.  We’ve seen Deals targeting large spending, group behavior, time of day and day of the week – all great examples of Best Customer behavior characteristics.  While the industry has obsessively focused on frequency-based loyalty marketing, we’ve been learning that many, many other characteristics drive who, when  and how a business wants to drive demand. A carpet cleaner has a different definition from a wine store, which is different from a bistro.

We’re bringing this learning into our newest tool – the Best Customer List.  The first thing Merchants asked for was a way to capture the email addresses, so they can “put them on their list”.  We countered with some great “imagine if” discussions, and pretty soon our product began to form.

While email marketing is a proven model, it has never really lived up to its potential for a variety of reasons.  We know that our model of social commerce, where we combine transactions, time/day, social reach and business generated consumer content, forms a much richer model of everyday social commerce.

A Few Highlights

In the screen shot below, you’ll see a few things that begin to separate the Best Customer model from a simple approach of capturing a consumer’s email or social media contact.  I’ll highlight five things that we’re most intrigued with.

1. Customer Ratings & Tags.  The point of deal redemption creates a great opportunity for the business to record simple contextual information about a customer.  A simple rating, perhaps selecting from 2-3 descriptive tags (such as party size, family vs. friends, etc.), can be a simple click action recorded when the transaction is fresh.
2. Time and Date.  We obsess about helping merchants stimulate demand when it’s most valued.  Knowing day and time patterns allows you to focus a promotion on these dimensions of Best Customers.
3. Social Scoring.  We’re beginning to evaluate all of the great new third party API’s to append social reach scoring, to drive maximum impact, and to target social oriented offers.
4. Smart Filters & Groups.  It’s one thing to create a flexible list; it’s another to make it super-simple for targeted promotions.  A set of “Smart Filters” give you unique group views of your customers in one click.  Groups are custom collections of customers for private deal distribution.
5. Integrated Groups and Promotion Distribution. At any time a business can push a customized Social Select deal to a list of individuals.  Want to drive early week traffic?  Create a group of 2 and 3-star customers who have completed a transaction more than 30 days ago, on Sunday-Wednesday, and deliver your saved “Off Peak” promotion.  Measure, rinse, repeat!

So, as it should be, this is just the start.  We’d love to engage with partners that see the value we’re creating, and want to combine forces for powerful customer solutions. We’re here to be a high impact companion product that completes that circle with social marketing agencies, deal publishers, merchant service applications and local media publishers.

Our topic was “Adapting Daily Deals to Live LBS.” In some respects this title felt a little backwards, in other ways it’s a perfect reflection of the industry momentum.  We began Closely grounded in the vision that live media is the killer foundation for advancing social marketing.  The combo strikes at the heart of our mission to empower businesses to stimulate demand when and where they need it the most.  Along the way, the incredible bursting success of Daily Deals has upstaged the LBS industry with revenue momentum and value growth – perfectly reinforced two days ago by GroupOn’s acquisition of one of pioneering LBS tech players, Pelago.

But, alas, these are temporary labels for products that need to be thought of (and designed) as the tools to reinvent how businesses engage with and through their customers, visitors and nearby prospective customers. In this presentation, we (tongue in check) refer to the shift towards “Self-administered Variable Value Live Social Promotion Units“. But hey, that’s essentially what we’ve constructed, and then sliced neatly into simple digestible everyday social marketing uses with better branding

Oh, and as for the “self-administered” part?  We build our tech to give every business total control over their promotions, but we’re also deeply committed to the “agency/multi-location layer”.  We ascribe to the assisted living model of local marketing – the value will be realized when smart marketing services are applied, on behalf of the business.

We hope you enjoy – and hey, if you like it, do pass it along!