My final project on the masters in e-commerce at DCU. I developed the idea & led a team of four people over the summer 2010. The project was a business plan for a discount and promotional advertising platform, that lets companies automatically promote their product and service offerings to an increasingly value hungry consumer market. It provides highly targeted and location based discount advertising to consumers in a more cost effective and efficient way than existing platforms and marketing
channels.
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DCU Practicum Presentation - ValuePal
1. ValuePal The best deals from your favourite companies Barry Sweeney Michael Mone Ciaran Griffin Dheeraj Kumar
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3. 92.6% stated that their purchasing habits had changed as a result of the recession and that they are now researching more actively for better value products and services – our research
4. Retailers have been aggressively responding by providing more deal’s, engaging in promotional activities - PWC 2010
5. “the majority of retailers believe that these changed consumer habits are permanent” – PWC 2010 = growth in discount and promotional advertising (incentive advertising
6. Promotional Marketing “Internet searches for discount vouchers in the UK have increased by 47.5% in the 12 months to August 09” – Experian Hitwise 2009 “on-line retailers now receives 1/100 visits from a voucher website” – Experian Hitwise 2009 “28% more of consumers were looking for promotional offers than they were in July 2009, which raises to 41% in 16-24 year olds” – Valassis Ltd 2010 “66.2% used a voucher or coupon in a retail store in the last 12 months.” – our research “82.4% would not feel uncomfortable displaying a coupon at a checkout to receive a discount.” – our research
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8. 100% would like to use the internet more to promote their business
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11. Use Cases Create & publish a discount offer Specifying promotion method , details & method of redemption . Published to ValuePal homepage of customers in Cork, who have selected Rainbow as a preferred company or specified an interest in gift & home wares. Benefit to partner: targeted and cost effective: €4. Benefit to customer: Easily acquired, money saving deal from a company they like.
12. Use Cases Excess inventory of rooms this weekend. Create a group deal, to sell 10 at 50% discount or €50. If 10 customers commit, we make €25 commission. The benefit: the hotel can market their deal quickly and effectively to a targeted customer base.
13. Use Cases 32 Stores nationwide, but only want to create a deal in the Galway outlets. Select digital redemption method, input barcode. Fully trackable in terms of redemption and ROI
17. On mobile View deals based on your location Display deal at checkout Retailer scans, you recieve discount Retailer can monitor redemption rates / ROI
18. Competition Fragmented, Complex, Dynamic Resurgence in light of recession driving innovation. Significant start-up activity in Group Deal sector.
19. Direct competition: Groupon 150 cities, $300m saved Group deals only 1 per day, lifestyle products & services 6 month waiting list High commission rate, up to 25%
20. Direct competition: onoffer.ie Broadly similar but critically different. No user preference or localisation filtering Not client managed solution €400 per month
22. Competitive Advantage Client managed solution – cost efficiencies Designed to allow partner flexibility For consumers, preference & location based We’ve assimilated the best features from the in industry to develop an Integrated, flexible, low cost platform which provides a win-win scenario constituents
23. Operations Year 1: Ireland 8 full time staff, two outsourced teams. Year 2: UK & Ireland: 15 full time staff, two outsourced teams. All other operation functions outsourced.
24. Sales & Marketing Key operational imperatives to future success. By the end of 2011 have 2,960 Irish partners, 4,283 end of 2013. By the end of 2012 have 12,149 UK partners, 27,662 by end of 2013. Acquire 350,000 Irish customers in 2011. Acquire 750,000 UK customers in 2012. Move from acquisition in Y1 to retention in Y2 & 3.
25. Marketing Establish ValuePal as a leading online brand. Focused on innovative & effective methods of communication to build long term relationships with partners and customers. Recruit experienced Marketing Director Year 1 Marketing budget allocation €618,000 UK Marketing budget allocation €2,200,000
The marketing channels available to SME’s to communicate their promotions remain largely cost prohibitive. We wanted to create a platform that would enable everyday businesses to capitalise on changing consumer trends, while fully leveraging the opportunities that the web provides
ValuePal is a display driven B2C only incentive advertising site which any business with acompelling deal can publish to suitable potential customers. It is about matching customerswith the companies that interest them, be that local businesses or national brands. The process of creating and publishing ads is entirely automated and controlled by our partnercompanies. They can select specifics such as who their ads are targeted to, where it isserved, for how long and what the method of redemption is. We match that against theregistered preferences, demographics and location of our customers,to ensure a win-win scenario for both constituents.
A florist, in cork with a stock of soon to wilt roses, that she needs to sell by Friday can create a 40% off voucher on Monday and set it to display to for 4 days. The benefit:existing online marketing tools for small businesses such as this are ineffective to theirneeds. AdWords is search based and the search volume for florists in corkwould be too low. Traditional marketing techniques are often cost prohibitive and taketime to plan. Beyond in-store or window displays, the options are limited. ValuePal givesthis florist the ability to quickly, easily and cost effectively create a marketingcampaign and targeted it to exactly the people they want in their area.
A hotel in Kerry, with spare capacity for the weekend can decide on a Monday to set upa group deal to sell the ten remaining rooms they have available. They will set the priceat a 50% discount or €50. They will chose to set the ad to run for four days and the adwill be severed to the homepage of registered customers who have selected an interestin hotels, The cost to the hotel to publish the deal will be nothing, if they sell all rooms,ValuePal take a 5% commission (€25) and the customers get 50% the standard price. Thebenefit: the hotel can market their deal quickly and effectively to a targeted customerbase.
Our market is fragmented, complex and dynamic. Direct competition is split in the form of group deal and voucher / coupon sites but no competition has yet combined those models. Indirect competition are many and varied from AdWords to printed vouchers books MoneySupermarket Vouchers recently reported said it experienced a 54% increase in visitors and they’ve responded with a recent tv campaign, which you may have seen, their first TV campaing for the site out side their core product offer of money & car insurance comparison. VoucherCodes.co.uk has seen traffic rise fourfold for day-out related vouchers since Easter.Technology Led clones, no investment in marketing, no differentiation.
Global leader in group buying sites, operating in 150 cities globally & has to date saved their customers $300m. Importantly is generating $1 million dollars a day on 50% margins It’s a group deal only site, 1 deal a day, in general lifestyle products and services categories with they select if it matches with their brand, so it’s not open to every business, but is immensely popular to the extent that there is a 6 month waiting list. Which can be seen as a positive for them, but is not necessarily a good thing for their partners. Many in this space, such Living Social, Boardsdeals etc
On offer is an Irish voucher & competition site, started in November 2009 is probably the best of the irish offerings. But it’s model is critically different in two ways: there is no user preference or localisation filtering, resulting in untargeted advertising being broadcast to all. i.e. People in Kerry don’t want to see ads from businesses in Dublin, men generally aren’t interested in viewing promos for tanning treatments. Like nearly all our competitors, it’s not a client managed solution. i.e. Their partner companies don’t create and publish them the ads themselves onoffer do, so they’ve to employ a graphic design to create the ads and redemption documentation and manually upload new ads. Resulting in a significant overhead for them and an inflexible solution for their partners. Which is evidenced in there pricing Many in this space such as 02treats & anposts shoppingdirectory.ie
Part of the MarkoMedia Group, a lead web marketing company in the UK which owns a number of internet properties, key among them myretailcodes.co.uk and Grouploa.co.uk, a group deals site and have a turnover £9.5. Again there is no preference based filtering or localisation and no client managed solution and they charge £250 per month. So a pointless & cost prohibitive marketing channel for local businesses and the only companies you find up there are the big UK brands; argus, curries, dixons etc.
Great flexibility - publish ads instrant
We believe Valuepal can & will be a highly scalable company, so it’s critical that we bring the relevant experience to help us achieve that, at board and senior management level, we intend to recruit an experienced Marketing director and a non exec. Angel to act in an advisory capacity on the board. Similarly we believe our automated system if designed right from start wont be an ongoing labour intensive operation. So our initial staffing requirements are low but structured for growth. Y1:4 senior management, 4 operations personnel, 2 outsourced teams. Y2: Raising to 15, 1 more webdeveloper, 1 marketing assist, Admin, FC, Sales Manager UK, 2 UK sales acct managers.
ValuePal is a sales and marketing company, not a technology company. Most of our competitors don’t recognise the same of their own businesses, don’t invest in sales & marketing and consequently have limited success. The same old problem for e-commerce companies, they drown in a see of a million websites by believing their site alone will attract customers but they wont, the same rules of sales & marketing apply online as they do offline and as such require significant, planning, investment and expertise. And we have big objectives. As comparison Pigsback have 500k registered in Ireland of which 310K are active, a platform on which the users requirements are far more onnerous and benefits less, so we believe ValuePal can do a significantly better job at attracting and retaining customers. In the UK m.arkomedia have over a 1 million subscribers
Cross over Attracting offline business We want our marketing campaign to have the scale and presence of board gais ‘big switch’ campaign. In terms of expenditure we envisage ourselves up there with moneysupermarket.com or expedia.co.uk, giving us the ability to cross over from an e-commerce to main stream brand.