Miscues in Marketing

Quoting Robert Burns, "The best laid schemes o' mice an' men. Go oft awry". That sometimes seems to be my mantra when it comes to marketing on the Internet. It is not always my ideas but the promotional schemes of companies that I have worked for seem to not always go so well.

Maybe I should take some of that back. There was one time I was at a web start-up (or is that being redundant?) for an antique website (or is that an oxymoron?) and we decided to give out free umbrellas with the company logo on it. They were nice umbrellas, costing about $10 a piece. We had 200 of them to start. All anyone had to do was request one from the site.

It was early in the game and we were not even on the search engines yet. The offer went out live in the middle of the week and we had maybe 1 person request one. We figured that it might take a few weeks before the supply was used up. But when we came in on Monday the following week, there was over 1,000 requests for umbrellas! It took us awhile to figure out what had happened but we found out that there was a website that listed contest and freebies available on the web. I guess they found out about the site and posted it over the weekend. The whole week was spent on trying to send out umbrellas.

Next: Knives, Bombs and Movies

$1 Lunch Day at Groupon

Groupon.com sent out an email saying that this friday they will be offering thousands of lunch deals for $1. They will be partnering with Feeding America to provide half-a-million meals to families during the holiday season.

It sounds like a great idea, a way to help out families and also to get a meal on the cheap. But I was very disappointed to see how few options they had. In the New York city area alone, there were only 2 offers and they were already sold out by 8:30am. In Boston there was one lone restaurant and that was 14 miles south of the city. After checking over 25 cities around the United States, I only saw another offer in Austin, Texas and that was also sold out. There was nothing in places like Chicago, Dallas, Philadelphia, Houston, Los Angeles, Portland, Washington, DC, etc.

Maybe this is only the beginning of the program and they will be able to raise money for Feeding America but from "thousands of lunch deals for $1" to only 4? It seems that they are running this promotion like they ran their IPO with lots of false starts. Hopefully they can get their act together.

* Spoke a little bit too soon. Around 10am they loaded up some more offers but still far from the thousands they said in their email. Noticing around a dozen offers for cities that have any offers posted and they are going fast. At least this is all for a good cause as Groupon is giving a portion of the proceeds to Feeding America.

Eating on the cheap

Just received an email from restaurant.com with an offer that I had to pass along. For a very limited time, they are offering $25 gift certificates to restaurants for $3. The offer is good from only November 16th through the 20th. After you place your order on their website, at checkout, type in the promo code "travel" and they will apply the discount.

It appears that if you purchase a gift certificate for a specific restaurant the amount of the discount may vary. You are probably better off getting an eGift card. The cost is $3 per card but they do add on a $1.50 handling fee. Still that isn't bad for a $25 gift certificate.

Restaurant.com has tens of thousands of restaurants participating in their program throughout the United States, so there is a good chance you can find something that you would like to go try.

I do have to offer two caveats about their certificates. They do not expire but there is some small print that you have to be aware of. Most of the restaurants have a minimum spending amount in the $35 range. So if you use the certificate you will still be spending another $10, but it is still a bargain that you can get a $35 meal for around $15.

The other caveat I find a little bit more harder to swallow in that the restaurants will automatically be tacking on an 18% gratuity to your bill. Some will even charge 20%. I don't mind paying a gratuity but it should be based on the customer's experience and not forced down their throats. All of the small print is easily available for each restaurant on the restaurant.com website.

Now where shall I go out to eat?

Saluting Veteran's on Veteran's Day

In order to make ToYou.com more useful, we have started to trawl the many half-off websites out there so we can list deals that some people might miss. Besides seeing the difference in the types of offers that exist from region to region in the United States (and boy, there is a difference in east coast and west coast offers) we came across one offer from LivingSocial.com.

In their Chicago section they were offering people the opportunity to have a care package worth $30 to be sent to a member of the U.S. armed forces. The cost to you would only be $15 and you would receive a U.S. flag as well. The offer runs until November 20th and is a great idea on this Veteran's Day or really any other day for that matter. There is never a bad day to support the troops.

It doesn't appear that this offer is limited to only people living in the Chicagoland area, so it does seem kind of strange that they didn't promote this offer in the dozens of other cities that LivingSocial covers.

If you are interested in the offer, go to: http://livingsocial.com/deals/166281-15-toward-a-care-package-for-us-troops-+-flag.