Hot UK Deals - A Marketing Headache
by matt @ 12:09 pm. Blogged under Web Technology, Email Marketing
Discounts as purchase incentives are as old as the Earth, if properly tracked they tell marketers a great deal about the best sources of customer - enabling the optimisation of marketing budgets accordingly. Then along comes the Internet and a website which lists hundreds and thousands of current promotional codes from across the marketing landscape - from print magazines and ‘junk mail’ to online. Now consumers only have to visit ‘Hot UK Deals’ to choose from a number of current retailer offers if they are about to make a purchase; yesterday Suzie_Q saved £20 on a John Lewis web purchase courtesy of an offer from a magazine she never even bought or read.
Of course from a sales perspective this seems like great news - more purchases means more revenue - but that’s not always the case. If a magazine circulation is expected to be 5,000 and the take up in discounted sales relatively acceptable, what does a retailer do with ten times as many discounted sales and an overall loss? And what of the marketing analysis and planning; suddenly this tiny magazine seems to be a better source of conversions than the retailer’s existing customer database - how does a marketer get to the ‘real’ figure?
These questions must already be causing problems in board rooms across the world. I’m not sure whether retailers could do anything to stop the behaviour of sites like Hot UK Deals, it seems to be a natural exploitation of the Internet’s power to unite us all as a single source of buyers, with industry-wide knowledge of pricing and discounts… and to think my old economics teacher used to say ‘Perfect Competition is an idea and not a reality’. First price comparison with Kelkoo and Dealtime, now a database of discount vouchers and codes.
Technorati Tags: perfect competition, hot uk deals, price comparison, discounts, coupons, vouchers, marketing
Loading ...
September 7th, 2007 at 3:36 pm
The mere fact that the internet is so powerful in its ability to make information available to everyone means that there is no point in trying to control sites such as this. The alternative for companies is to factor in Hot UK deals for example in to their marketing plans so that if their tightly controlled promotion does go global they do not make a loss. This would in general terms mean that the percentages and deals would need to be set at a lower level of discount which ultimately harms the consumer.
It would also be naive to assume that companies are not wise to the phenomenon and accidently leak such promotion codes on to these sites in order to drive traffic to their own websites and increase their own presence on the web. You can also use analytics packages to identify the source of a sale. But, does the source really matter if you can convert the deal hunting consumer in to a loyal and regular customer?
September 12th, 2007 at 7:56 pm
Knowing a little bit about how these “deals” sites work, and having watched Hot UK Deals over the past year or so, it’s clear that some companies have taken to using the deals sites as valid marketing channels, publishing their own deals onto the sites under assumed names.
However, it is worth remembering that these deal sites are just affiliate marketers - if you click to the deal via the site, the site gets paid. That’s why they exist. If the company offering the deal has an issue with the traffic these deal sites are bringing, they can always program the voucher codes so they don’t work with that (or any) affiliate ID. It won’t stop all traffic from the deals sites (I frequently go directly to the site without using the link on the deals site), but it would stop it becoming a free for all, and allow them to better analyse the effectiveness of, say, a voucher published in a magazine.
November 20th, 2007 at 7:34 pm
I noticed there is a new uk deal site trying to take on hotukdeals.
http://uk.dealcomet.com
November 21st, 2007 at 11:02 pm
I don’t like the look of dealcomet.com. Also it didn’t load properly. Hotukdeals still rocks my world!
November 22nd, 2007 at 1:07 am
This is another new one:
www.feedmedeals.co.uk
November 22nd, 2007 at 8:22 am
there seem to be a load of these popping up but I can’t say if most of them are any good. Retailers are in control of their tracking software meaning they can decide how to track links from these sites. I think rather than bypass these sites marketers have to embrace them as a channel - which I think they do as they generate a good deal of sales I am sure. dealcomet looks to be a US firm which is cheeky. If anyone is doing a decent job of taking on hotukdeals it would be http://feedmedeals.co.uk who I just found as number 2 on google behind hotukdeals when search for hot uk deals. How many ‘deals’ sites can you have online - as many as there are electronic retails online, or florist delivery services or…??
December 12th, 2007 at 7:52 am
Another one is http://www.rboffers.com they have been around for as long as hot uk deals.