Direct Mail Scratch Cards Promote Daily Deal Website
Online daily deal website Bare Deal (http://www.baredeal.com) is using good old fashioned direct mail to attract users to take advantage of offers from Chicago-area businesses.
Justin Shapiro, cofounder of the site, says he thinks physical tangible mailing pieces are more reliable than online printouts as a means for consumers to develop loyalty to local merchants.
“There’s actually a way we can combine the online deal model with traditional mail and it’s a model we believe it is a lot more interactive than what’s currently out there,” says Shapiro. “We didn’t think anybody else was doing this for local companies so we decided to try it.”
The site currently offers deals for Chicago, and in 2011 plans to add localized deals from businesses in Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, Nashville, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, DC.
Bare Deal currently has over 2,000 end-users and several dozen local merchants like restaurants and hair salons, who are each featured on the site for a week. Consumers who have opted-in receive an email on Tuesday alerting them to the deals of the week.
“All of our merchants are brick and-mortar establishments and we didn’t feel like a black-and-white coupon that’s basically a clickthrough printout really provides marketing force,” he notes.
“If [consumers] select the deal, we mail them a customized scratch card with variable discounts from that merchant,” says Shapiro.
Facebook and Twitter are also being used to develop a database for the Chicago-based company, which was launched last April.
Despite using direct mail for its daily deals, Bare Deals is “focused right now on social media like Facebook, Twitter, as well as on word-of-mouth” to find potential users, says Shapiro.
A five person sales team is working on signing up new merchants for the site; Shapiro hopes to have about 100 merchants signed up over the next few months, and attract 10,000 consumers to join the database.
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