Groupon: A way to Market Your Business? But Not For Legal Services

You may have heard of voucher websites such as vouchercodes.co.uk or other offer-based sites. One such business that is causing a buzz is Groupon.

What is Groupon?
Groupon is a voucher website with a difference. It is entirely unique in its own concept of bargains. Instead of giving subscribers run-of the-mill discounts such as ‘241 at Pizza Express’, it produces one-off offers with as much as 75% off services such as facials, cinema tickets, wine tasting, teeth whitening and even hiring an Aston Martin. The unique and brilliant offers are sent to your inbox daily making Groupon stand out from other voucher and coupon websites because of the massive savings and the high quality businesses that are using it to promote their business.

Anyone can access these offers by subscribing on the website to their mailing list.  Once that is complete Groupon will email you every day with their latest deal for your city.  There are currently 150 cities included on the site but this is set to increase as the company has been expanding at a rapid pace.

Groupon is a relatively young company, launched 18 months ago in Chicago. It has had its battles with copy-cat companies.  Rather than using Groupon as a rough-guide some companies in Russia and other Eastern-Bloc countries actually used Groupon as a template for their sites right down to the web design. However, Groupon has managed to stop them.

A Social media following
A reason for Groupon’s rapid expansion is its huge fan base.  Using Social Networking sites this company has been able to expand nationwide and worldwide.  It has a large following on Twitter, and on Facebook and this is just the UK branch.  There are 24 other countries that have Groupon fans watching their in-boxes daily for cut-price excitement.

Groupon offers a small monetary incentive to subscribers for every friend they invite to the site that signs up.   The deals on Groupon are available for one day only and there is a limit to the number of people that can buy them which makes the site more exclusive than other discount sites. The deals are different for each city, but you do not have to have a high street shop or restaurant to be involved – Groupon include exclusive online deals as well.

Marketing your business
So, if you have a small online business, Groupon could be a way to market your company. The exclusivity and limit on numbers is ideal for small businesses looking for new customers, as it guarantees customers once you sign up to give away things or give discounts, but also means you can control the number of people who can take up your offer.

In the current economic climate when businesses may be in need of new ways to entice customers and clients, offering discounts to others, who may also have been affected by the crisis, could be worth considering as a marketing option.

Registration steps
For UK based service providers  their franchise site Groupon UK is the place to look. The process for registration involves sending an email to [email protected] with a basic summary of the type of services or goods you supply from your business.

We contacted them to find out more about the registration process.  Their response time was not great. We were not able to get through to their support number either. Eventually they responded by email.

Use for legal services?

We made enquiries about offering trademark registration services, which are fixed price, and therefore unlike many other legal services.  They informed us that they are not currently covering legal services.  For law firms considering this further, it may be worth reading this piece Ethics vs. Professionalism: Is Groupon Feasible for Lawyers? by Lawyerist.com