...you cannot build a large, targeted subscriber list. The process of amassing a group of people interested in your business concept, whether they are email subscribers, Facebook fans, or Twitter followers, is non-negotiable and should always precede your launch. There are rarely any effective shortcuts for this process, including importing a list of email address from elsewhere, buying Facebook fans and Twitter followers, and promoting your new daily deal website to an existing community in which you already wield influence. Nothing beats building an opt-in subscriber list from the ground up.

The reason that most of the abovementioned shortcuts fail in converting “leads” into buyers is simple: a betrayal of expectations. No doubt you may be importing an email list that is an “opt-in” list, but consider the fact that one man’s opt-in list is another man’s bulk mailing list. If I opted in for newsletters from Her World magazine, I am not expecting (and would be quite furious) to receive offerings from Cleo magazine. Buying Facebook fans and Twitter followers to look credible is simply wasteful, because: 1) it is way too easy to spot fake fans and followers, and 2) nobody actually cares about the number – what they really want to see is that the brand owner is willing to and constantly engages her brand enthusiasts; the fan or follower count is a mere symptom of responsible brand ownership.

Occasionally, “expectation betrayal” applies to promoting deals to an existing community in which you wield influence, e.g. promoting make-up deals to your make-up tips blog readers, though we have seen mixed results when this type of promotion is done. One of our customers did very well with this (this one, in particular), but others have only seen mediocre results. If you already have access to an existing community that trusts and likes you, this tactic is worth a shot.

However, a genuine opt-in list almost always results in good sales, assuming that you have been talking to them personally and getting to know what deals they would want to buy. The biggest mistake when deciding what deals to sell is possibly selling deals based on what merchant-supplier relationships that you have (vendor convenience) rather than what deals your subscribers say they would buy (demand fulfillment).

How important is lead acquisition anyway?

As a growing daily deal platform that hosts hundreds of daily deal websites, we have witnessed time and time again how daily deal websites usually fail, mostly because of marketing failure, or, more specifically, failure in lead acquisition. Acquiring leads is hard. There are many products in the market that cost a bomb targeted at just acquiring leads using gimmicks like social media contests, e.g. Wildfire, Offerpop, etc. – people not only pay money but also pay good money to acquire genuine leads. (Coincidetally, our daily deal platform, Zuupy CrowdDeals, also offers this feature in the form of a free deal/lucky draw, which has already proven to be effective in acquiring leads in a fraction of the usual cost – a real-life case study will be coming very soon.)

So what is the right way to acquire leads for new daily deal websites?

As implied by the above paragraph, I am inclined to say that contests, lucky draws, and giveways are almost the quickest and most effective way to build leads for a new daily deal website. Invest some money into crafting an attractive lucky draw offering (like this one), and post it on Facebook, Twitter, forums, and blog comments regularly, and you should do rather well. As long as your offering is something relevant to the audience that you are targeting (e.g. shopping vouchers for women), your subscriber count should start to authentically go up, and so should your sales.