While you've been pre-occupied thinking of the financial crisis and wondering whether or not you've still got work, a silent e-commerce evolution has spring up. Companies of all sizes, particularly in the US, have been making use of Discounts to expand their business.

But at present these sites are prospering here in the UK.

Offers, Deals, Bargains and Discounts in the UK

Bargains are back with a bang as witnessed by the recent rise in US deal and coupon, websites. In reality, they never did disappear. Offers, Deal, Bargains and Discounts have been used to encourage new customers to take immediate advantage of services for as long as people have been trading.

But what has changed recently is the advent of the online technologies that make managing Discounts straightforward. This has caused a rise in deal sites but it is not without issue; there are some old-time challenges to conquer still.

The overall challenge is one of conversion but it falls into three,3 activities,main duties.

1. Attracting Retail Customers

2. Acquiring Business Clients

3. Getting Traffic the Online Business

1- Attracting Clients

This is a normal selling activity of persuading normal retail customers to subscribe to the offers site. Be aware that normal does not mean easy! It can seem like an up-hill struggle. Selling is typically difficult for many people.

Subscribing to the site is the normal way for potential customers to be informed of new deals as they get created. The normal term for this activity is list-building and is typically done via all kinds of opt-in pages. The issue for potential people is that this means for them, receiving yet more emails to their already brimming-over mailboxes. Most of these emails they will probably ignore.

But, for this to really work, it relies on being able to persuade partners to create irresistible offers that can hardly be ignored by customers. This leads to the other point.

"What sort of deals?" I hear you ask

Well, any kind of offer based on a product, service or some kind of experience where there is a known retail price and a definite discount price. Some common examples are weekend breaks, sports apparel, weekends away, accommodation breaks, holiday escapes, guitar tutorials, travel deals, pedicures, manicures, one-to-one coaching for badminton, hair treatments, dining out and many more, limited only by creativity of the merchant.

2- Finding Partners

This task is plain old persuasive selling and includes getting merchants and other partners to consider using Offers as a strategy for attracting new customers. For many of these partners, normal marketing is considered by them to be high cost and random. So the most important way to persuading them of this way is to promote the idea to them in a way that shows it is risk free for them. i.e. no initial payments for them and in a way that show most of the work is done for them. They pay on results only.

Something else to bear in mind is that making Offers,Deals,Bargains,Discounting available is quite a frequently used strategy,approach by companies. It is interesting,fascinating,remarkable though, how a surprisingly large number of companies regard a 10% discount off a product,service as a killer,fantastic offer,deal! Changing,Affecting the thinking,mindset of potential partners can be surprisingly hard and requires,needs real effort,skill and perserverance.

So the success of any campaign, that includes the merchant giving proper offers to customers, depends on the merchant taking a risk of some sort. They need to move away from their well-tried, worn-out, old practices of offering little to customers to concentrating harder about cross-selling and upselling the customer whenever the customer has been persuaded into their companies.

Additionally, partners need to focus more on giving real service to their customers, giving real value and building longer-term dealings with the new customers. However, this is still old fashioned persuasive selling.

3- Getting Traffic & Website Promotion

As with any new site, making people aware of it is important. Links with appropriate keywords pointing back to the main site is useful, as is creating press releases, videos, presentations, articles, podcasts, organic search traffic and ads to get the site out there. Just like a physical business, without traffic there is not much point being in business.

So blog posts, adverts, articles, videos, podcasts and press releases are all great techniques of getting visitors thereby promoting it. Unsurprisingly, promoting any such site requires resource, skill, energy and effort.

Conclusion

In summary, attracting new customers, acquiring partners and getting traffic and publicising the web service are as difficult as ever.

My particular interest is in getting local companies to better handle their future by attracting more customers and new customers while not diminishing their product or their service. As the manager of www.RollingOffers.com, creating London Deals, Great Offers in London, London Bargains and great Discounts in London is my most important duties at this time.

The other side, of course, is to work hard to persuade partners to think in a way that makes their offers irresistible. 10% discount is not an offer that majority of potential customers would give a second glance to. We all want to take weekend breaks, have autumn holidays away, have great food whenever we want and do all the other things that most people do to feel alive.

Being creative and employing rebel methods other than email, of getting your product noticed, may well be necessary as well as to the tried and tested ways for real success of this business.