December 2013 was the best month for BuyTexasDeals.com. Ever.
With the timing of Cyber Week and the holidays in 2013, we wanted to make sure we ended the year strong, so we identified several things that we wanted to focus on that we felt would make a big difference in our deals revenue for the month and beyond. December ended up being our biggest revenue month ever – generating over $35K. For a small daily newspaper, this was truly a December to remember. Here’s what we did:
Focus on what’s working. Restaurants and spa & massage are the most popular categories on the BuyTexasDeals.com site, so while we normally try to keep our deals diverse, we decided that the holiday season would be the perfect time to put up as many restaurant and spa & massage deals as we could. As a result, these restaurant and spa & massage deals accounted for 62% of our sales in December! We plan to continue focusing on restaurant and spa & massage deals going forward, because those are clearly the categories that resonate best with our audience. Aligning your deals with the categories that are popular with your audience is a best practice. Always keep your audience in mind!
Run a card. After hearing about the opportunity with golf cards in a recent webinar, we started working on our own, with the goal of launching in December – just in time for the holidays. We were able to secure 14 golf courses, and put our $99 for $400 CenTex Golf Pass up for sale on December 1st. We’ve sold over 100 since launch, and we plan to continue to sell and promote the card throughout the year and expect is to be a big part of our deals success in 2014. The great thing about golf cards, in particular, is that they can run throughout the season and have a long shelf life. We’re also planning to launch even more cards in 2014, from nails to massages to barbecue.
Leverage partnership opportunities. We hit the ground running pretty fast in 2014, as the Killeen Daily Herald officially partnered with our sister paper, The Temple Daily Telegram, on the 1st of the year. Now our BuyTexasDeals ads will run in both papers, they have shared their email database with us, so we will be able to reach an even wider audience with our deals in 2014. Whether you partner internally or with another local media company in your market not doing deals, getting your brand in front of a new audience is a great path to further growth.
Grow your database. Since so much deals revenue comes directly from deal emails, having a robust database is incredibly important. At the Killeen Daily Herald, we focus on growing our database with email opt-ins on the registration pages for a variety of contests, including a football Big Game pick’em, a college basketball bracket, and photo submission contests for Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, and Father’s Day. For the Super Bowl, we partnered with a local Wing Stop to give a way 4 party packs. 864 people registered and over 600 opted into our deals database…an excellent return on a 2 week contest!
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