How has Groupon effectively used personal selling, advertising, and public relations to market its products?How has Groupon effectively used personal selling, advertising, and public relations to market its products?
Expert Answer
Introduction:
- Gnome will enable Groupon’s merchants to better manage their transactions, keep track of customers to launch specific marketing campaigns and simplify the whole process of Groupon redemption.
- Integration of CRM (customer relationship management) modules will be a significant jump over how the system worked before.
- Customers will not need to carry the printed copy of their voucher or show it to the merchant on their mobile device, as they’ll be able to redeem it using Bluetooth.
- With Gnome hardware, Groupon is hoping to change its brand perception and improve customer retention.
- Analysis of purchase history will help the company and its merchants gain marketing insights, which in turn will help them create specific advertisements and improve email relevance.
Stepping Up Marketplaces Efforts:
- Groupon continues to ramp up its efforts of encouraging its subscribers to search for deals and explore its marketplace (‘pull’ strategy) instead of relying on emails (‘push’ strategy).
- It needs an image makeover, and accelerating such subscriber shift will smoothen out its top line growth and help reign in expenses. In March 2014, about 9% of Groupon’s traffic in North America is comprised of searches on its online marketplace.
- This implies that email related traffic still accounts for more than 90% of the company’s traffic. Given that Groupon has touted its ‘pull’ strategy for the last few quarters, its progress so far appears to be a little disappointing.
- Customers who consciously search for deals tend to spend more and have shorter redemption cycles, which suggest that the company’s operations can get a significant boost if it accelerates customer shift from emails to marketplace.
These are the ways in which Groupon effectively used personal selling, advertising, and public relations to market its products.