One of the most important factors that determine the success of your daily deal website is the size of your subscriber list. In fact, if you are not confident about building up your subscriber list rapidly to thousands of subscribers within weeks, you might as well not start a daily deal website. And building means building, not buying or transplanting.

There are two possible strategies to employ when building your subscriber list: organic and non-organic. Organic methods basically require the subscribers to actively type in their email addresses and click the subscribe button. Non-organic methods, otherwise known as spamming/cheating, basically involve spamming offers to people who never said that they even cared about daily deals, much less your fledgling daily deal website. If you are thinking about using non-organic methods, such as sending offers to your friends and family or buying a mailing list, just stop, unless you want to rapidly lose friends and money. It does not matter how big or promising your purchased mailing list is. You are a spammer. And no company has ever made spamming profitable. It will NEVER work. Or at least we have never seen it succeed, which says something, since we host more than 300 daily deal websites.

Now that we have gotten non-organic methods out of the way, here are some organic methods for your consideration:

1. Begin with a niche
It is surprising that many daily deal websites still dare to open shop and compete directly with Groupon or other big daily deal players. It is pointless – you will never win, nor will you even “barely survive.” The first step in getting visitors and prospective buyers to hand over their email addresses is to have a unique premise that captures their attention. There is a surplus of generic daily deal websites already; starting yet another is suicide. You need to differentiate your daily deal website in an increasingly-saturated industry by picking an underserved market segment: a geographical niche, a demographic niche, an industrial niche, etc. All things being equal, a generic daily deal website is much less likely to survive than, say, a daily deal website targeted at women selling health and beauty products.

2. Get impressions for your URL on the world wide web
People online are already too busy using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, and 9GAG to even care about your new daily deal website launch. It is your job to go out there and make them aware of your new website. That means posting your URL on forums, blog comment sections, Facebook, Twitter, and discussion portals, like Reddit, according to your chosen niche in part 1. For instance, if you are starting a daily deal website for pets, post politely (and, as best as possible, be contextually relevant) on pet care blogs’ comment sections and pet care forums. Here is a workable plan: 1) google a list of blogs and forums dedicated to your niche and open the results in new tabs, 2) find a way to post your URL – register usernames if you have to – and do your sales pitch, and 3) keep doing it until you have posted 50 or 100 URLs for the day or whatever target you think is necessary to bring in traffic, even for the short term. And do track your traffic using Google Analytics. There is almost no other way around this. If you are hoping that your website spreads like wildfire through viral marketing or even pay-per-click marketing like Facebook Ads, fat chance!

3. Run lucky draws and free deals, amplified by Facebook and Twitter
People are already inundated with enough spam and unwanted emails to know better than to simply give out their email addresses. When you launch, people have exactly zero trust in your new daily deal website, which is why it is important to start small and start interesting with a lucky draw or free deal. People want to be enticed to care about your daily deal website. The bad news is that, either way, it is going to cost money. The good news is that spending money to entice people to give you their email addresses is probably more sensible and cheaper than simply spending money to entice people to come to your barren, boring website, e.g. via Google AdWords. Giving out one iPad in a lucky draw costs you a few hundred dollars and can probably net you 1,000 opt-in email addresses. Google AdWords and Facebook Ads? Never!

4. Great deals – sell them
Many players new to the daily deal industry expect visitors to give up their email addresses when your deal inventory is pitiful. Of course, selling to merchants is hard when you do not have a big subscriber list – it is a chicken-and-egg situation – but you have to do both simultaneously, because they are mutually-reinforcing. The more interesting deals you have, the more likely that you look like an established website and the more likely that people want to give up their email addresses. The more email addresses you have, the easier it is to work with merchants to sell their deals. Here is a tip: attack the merchant side of things first. Sell deals for merchants even for free at the start (if you need to) to get your hands on a great deal. By the way, if you need a guide on what makes a great deal great, here are some characteristics of a great deal.

5. Get a few large deal aggregators to promote deals for you
This method will cost money in that you will need to hand over an affiliate commission for referrals, but it is one of the best ways to reach a broad audience, gain instant credibility, and get not only new subscribers but also new buyers, without spending any upfront cash. Some examples include DealSurf and AllTheDeals. How do you convince an established deal aggregator to list your deals? Simple, by following parts 1 and 4 above.

Finally, half of knowing how to get subscribers is knowing how not to get subscribers. Non-organic ways should be avoided like the plague, just as a recap, but it is also important to avoid broader fatal mistakes that will indirectly hamper your ability to get subscribers and build your mailing list (here is a list). Good luck with your daily deal website!

Here is a plausible thought: it is possible to have a really great deal that is in demand and still have poor sales coming from it because of obstacles that exist along the way after your visitor has decided to purchase the deal, e.g. laborious checkout process, checkout surprises like large shipping costs (for shipped products), and, yes, ridiculous fine print – ridiculous in terms of quantity and nature. A good practice to adopt is to be a daily deal consumer yourself, especially for the goods and services that you already routinely pay full price for, and try to understand the mentality and behavior of daily deal consumers.

Consumers generally only start reading the fine print of a deal – which, needless to say, is a chore and a potentially-killjoy activity – when they have somewhat made up their mind to purchase the deal. If an item in the fine print is not essential, remove it. Expiry dates are common and understandable, but some of the most common party poopers are: 1) “weekdays only” or other time-limited terms, 2) minimum purchase required, 3) venue restrictions, 4) item restrictions (e.g. only applicable to certain menu items in restaurants), and 5) unreasonable “while stock lasts” restrictions. The more fine print a deal has, the less freedom and thus more stress the consumer has in using the voucher. In a way, it feels as if the merchant and the daily deal website are not sincere about welcoming new customers to try out their offering.

To instill some fine print discipline, daily deal websites can try sticking to some internal rules. For instance, a daily deal website owner can vow to only include a maximum of 5 fine print per deal or swear not to include a certain type of fine print (e.g. minimum purchase). No consumer likes fine print, and, to some extent, merchants do not necessarily reap a net benefit by having them. It may even serve as a competitive advantage; while your competitors are incorrigibly saddling their deals with an absurd, stress-inducing amount of fine print, you are making your deals easy to understand at a glance and also putting forth a sincere offer that is not ridden by terms that consumers may not notice before purchase.

Have we seen deals with a large amount of fine print do well across our network of hosted sites? Certainly. A low volume of fine print is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for a deal to sell well, but it definitely is a factor in favor of increasing sales. The general rule of how to sell things is 1) sell something people want and 2) make it easy for people to buy it. Of course, if you are not sure whether something has demand, do not bother about tweaking the fine print etc.; it will not help. Sometimes, however, your deal may be so wanted that your buyers would be willing to tolerate a certain amount of fine print beyond the ordinary – use your judgment to decide whether your particular segment of buyers would be bothered by the fine print vis-à-vis the uniqueness of your offer.