GrabOne is a great website to discover local New Zealand deals and limited time offers. Many businesses use these kind of deal sites to promote discounted services and drive new business. However, for some businesses and products, making enough money from the campaign to make it worth your while can be a challenge (after you discount the product or service and then pay the deals site their commission).
Marcia Montgomery from The Nelson Herbal Dispensary wanted to promote the launch of her new business with a 20% special on 1 hour therapeutic massages. We discussed using GrabOne and decided that it would be better value for Marcia to run the deal campaign herself and keep a greater percentage of the profit. Marcia’s costs were reduced by running the campaign on her own. There was an upfront investment in the landing page design and the Facebook advertising. Credit card processing charges accounted for around 3% for each transaction. This compared very favourably to the 15%-20% commission she would have had to give GrabOne for each sale. It also helped to build brand awareness for the nelson Herbal Dispensary, as the advert was sending all the traffic to her website and not to GrabOne.
Here’s the process that we followed to generate a 578% return on Marcia’s investment.
Step 1: Setup a Facebook page, invite your friends
Do you have a Facebook page yet for your business? If not then you absolutely should go and create one, go ahead we’ll wait.
A Facebook page can help you leverage the power of social marketing and opens the door to Facebook ads which are the key to many successful marketing campaigns. You definitely want to create a business page rather than rely on your personal Facebook page so that you can invite others from your team to help you manage the content and grow the page as a business asset.
Once you have a page you’ll want to make sure that people “like” it. Most businesses create a page and then wait for the page to generate likes on it’s own. You’ll be lucky if you have a handful of new likes a month. Instead you need to lose the shyness and broadcast your new page to your network. Encourage people to like it, even offer a free giveaway to one of the first hundred people to like the page.
Marcia had already enthusiastically encouraged her friends to like The Nelson Herbal Dispensary page on Facebook and was starting from a base of 130+ likes. This is a great number for a brand new business.
Step 2: Create a landing page for your limited time offer
Any online marketing campaign should have a dedicated landing page. A landing page is a dedicated page for one purpose, getting people to take action on your offer. Your home page is not good a fit for online marketing campaigns as it is often trying to send people to various parts of your website and people are easily distracted.
Landing pages should be specific, contain a clear call to action and match the language of the advert or marketing campaign. You should consider removing the menu so that people can’t navigate away to other parts of your website.
Step 3: Create a time limited payment form with Gravity Forms
We love Gravity Forms, it’s an excellent WordPress Plugin for creating online forms. In less than 20 minutes we whipped up a form for Marcia that collected contact details, put a limit on the total number of entries and set an expiry date on the form so that no one could purchase a discounted massage after the limited time offer had run out.
We then embedded the form on the landing page and hey presto, we were nearly ready to launch.
Step 4: Connect your credit card payment processor, Stripe for the win
Stripe is a wonderful credit card payment processor that has recently launched in New Zealand. They take care of all the security, technical details and provide a seamless, safe and user friendly credit card processing experience.
The key benefit of Stripe’s service is that they look after all the credit card information, none of it is stored in your website. This is very important, unless you are in the banking business you don’t want to be securing peoples credit card information!
Stripe also deposits money directly into your bank account unlike some other players in this field like Paypal.
Setting this up is a simple process, signup for an account, copy the API key. Gravity Forms has an add on for Stripe that needs to be installed. Once you’ve done this, enter the API key and your form is ready to go.
Gravity Forms has good documentation to help you here
Step 5: Promote your limited time offers on Facebook
Now you are ready to launch your campaign. Facebook’s advertising platform is really quite powerful. You can target people with specific interests, those in a certain location and even find audiences that are similar to your best customers.
Instead of creating a separate advert, Marcia created a post on her Facebook book page that was shared with those who already liked the page.
The Nelson Herbal Dispensary spent the princely sum of $15NZD to boost their post for 14 days. We spent some time with Marcia refining a target audience based on friends of the facebook page and their friends. That way the ad would be shown to a warm audience. Limiting the location to the Nelson region meant that Marcia wouldn’t waste money showing the advert to those who couldn’t take advantage of the limited time offer.
This is a good primer on facebook advertising – https://adespresso.com/academy/guides/facebook-ads-beginner/
The results, a 578% return on investment
Marcia was really pleased with the result. She sold plenty of massages which was the primary aim of the promotion. However, there were some other benefits as well. The Nelson Herbal dispensary had ~30 new likes to the Facebook page and many comments and shares of the post, their brand awareness was definitely boosted as a result of this campaign.
The best part is that she can reuse the landing page again in the future or duplicate it to launch new campaigns. A couple hours was all it took to create a landing page template for Marcia to use for this campaign and others like it in the future. A small investment that more than paid for itself, with the added bonus of making future campaigns much cheaper to create.
