There’s a deal going on for small business owners. And it’s aimed at getting your brand well-known in virtual couponing circles. Yowza!!, a location-based mobile coupon app, joined in on the second annual Small Business Saturday® on November 26, 2011. Yowza!! is supporting the Small Business Saturday Coalition by offering two free monthsof service followed by a 50 percent discounted monthly rate to the first 15,000 merchants who join by Nov. 26, 2011.
The American Express Small Business Saturday promotion gives participating merchants two months of free Yowza service and discounts its normal $89 monthly fee by 50% off for 2012, so the monthly fee would be $44.50. As David Teichner, CEO, Yowza!! noted that a full year with Yowza is about what a retailer would pay for a traditional print coupon promotion with one of the coupon services.
“Coupons have always been a sales driver for small businesses, and mobile coupons have proven to be 10 times more effective than traditional coupons. With Yowza!!, merchants can post offers in seconds and reach consumers when they are on the go and looking to spend money,” said David. “We really designed the app for small independent businesses to bring couponing to them in an affordable manner. We focus on total simplicity. Our target is someone who is really busy, has the phone with them, they use it to shop and they want to save money. They can take the radius up to 50 miles they swipe it and up to 3 offers come up. It’s easy for the retailer. It was built with the small business owner in mind.”
Some other advantages to the platform is that users can save their favorite stores and opt-in if they are willing to receive more offers from their favorites. So each time I go in to change my offers those fans will be notified of my new deals.
“So it’s a nice tap on the shoulder saying they have a special offer coming up,” David remarked. “It’s really, really specific to the business. What we try to encourage people to do is get them to offer anything that someone can use at any point in time. This way consumers use the app as an every day coupon and merchants don’t have that pressure that to give something huge away to make the time limited offer worthwhile.”
David told me it was so simple even technically challenged merchants can use it. I was going to really challenge them and have my chef-husband sign us up. But instead, I gave him a break and took the challenge myself.
Now, I am not a novice to the online world, but I do have my shortcomings when it comes to learning new technologies. But the platform David described to me sounded like a good fit for our loyal customer base so I decided to give it a whirl.
Okay, signing up was easy. We’ll keep you posted on the process and the response once the deals start posting!
No comments:
Post a Comment