Wednesday, August 17, 2011

To Groupn or Not

I have now been approached by several different variations of the social group daily deal and I am always torn. Do you take the participants or the money? It seems with these deals you can't have them both.

On the one hand you want to grow your numbers and get participants that will hopefully come back next year at full price and be able to offer your potential sponsors more eyeballs. You also get exposure to a list you would not have otherwise been able to afford to send to.

On the other hand, when you do the math, you do not make diddly squat on these grouponees. In fact, you have a high potential of actually losing money if you don't get enough full paying customers or you get those participants who were going to sign up at full price see the deal and only give you half their money.

And, when you throw in a nonprofit partner who you have promised x percentage of all money coming in, well, you have just thrown in a whole new can of worms.

The other question is can you handle all the new people? It boils down to this, if you can't offer a great experience for all your participants and you end up making your full paying customers suffer because of this deal, and you are not offering your deal people a good experience, its not a good thing.

These are the decisions of a race director.