A Big Deal For Detailed Image
Today we’re really excited to be the featured partner for the launch of Car and Driver Magazine’s Dashboard Deals as well as Road and Track Magazine’s First Look Rewards, their new Groupon-like daily deal programs. I’m traveling this week. More to come on this when I return.
Awesome, congrats, I can’t wait for the follow up on this! See how successful it is and how the overall experience pans out.
Congrats! I too am interested in what kind of experience doing a daily deal is for the merchant.
This is pretty sweet. How did it go?
Long story short: not so well. The magazines didn’t promote it nearly as much as we were led to believe they would. There were some sales, so it wasn’t a total waste, but nowhere near what we were led to believe would be the “minimum” that their sales people told us. Such is life. It was worth a try. We structured it so we were profitable on a per-deal basis so there was no real risk.
That sucks – so many companies over promise and under deliver on stuff like this. Were you able to turn the buyers into repeat customers? What would you do differently in future if a company approached you with a similar deal?
Honestly I haven’t looked at whether the buyers bought more than once. There were so few of them that I’m not sure whether we could determine much.
In general I’m pretty skeptical when these types of companies contact us. Like you said, over promise and under deliver. Plus they always enforce these ridiculous deadlines on you…which we always bend upside down to meet…and then somewhere along the line they don’t follow through with their end of the bargain.
That said, we always listen. We negotiated the deal pretty good in terms of rev split. What we didn’t do was get the promotional avenues guaranteed in writing, which we will do next time because they absolutely did not promote it in all of the ways they said they would. In this case, it was a 3rd party managing it for them, so I suspect that it was the magazine’s fault and not the 3rd party company we were working with.