With addicted like behaviour millions of people are every day feverishly checking their inbox to get their fix of the latest offers.

There is clearly a huge appetite for daily deals and the question is how to take advantage of this opportunity. Let’s look at what makes the Groupon daily ‘fix‘ work.

Groupon, the world’s fastest-growing company ever, has in under two years grown to sending over 50 million emails per day. Its proving lucurative with Groupon taking a big slice of revenue it drives.

Any venture generating such huge growth attracts plenty of others wanting to get in on the action. In the case of daily deals some big names too. Such as Amazon backed LivingSocial, Google Offers, Facebook Places Deals and other smaller brands such as kgbdeals, discountvouchers.co.uk, SecretSales.

They all have in common a proposition of limited time daily discount deals. Consumers have shown they are very happy to get those deals through daily emails. Should brands now be thinking about cutting out the middle man and launching their own daily deals programmes?

So what makes daily deal programmes work?

• The consumer desire to feel they have got a steal.
• A different deal every day.
• A deep discount.
• Urgency created by very limited time availability.
• Fear of regret at not taking a deal, “if only I’d said yes”.
• Relevance of deal to the customer.
• Payment or reward for recommending deals to friends.

First step is to build the list of addicts. Permission and expectation of receiving a daily email is crucial. Place a quick and easy to use sign-up form in a prominent position on your home page. A simple box for the email address and a reason to subscribe. Be clear on the benefit offered. Set the expectation of receiving a daily email and as always, provide transparency about email addresses sharing and privacy policies. Consumers are much more comfortable and likely to subscribe when they know their email address will not be shared.

Then create your deals creative. Let’s breakdown the elements of the Groupon email design from the example below.

The email’s subject line, “Four One-Hour Pony Riding Lessons for £25″ clearly explains the offer. As readers filter emails by subject line, clarity of the main deal is vital here. A generic subject line like, “Your daily deals upto 65% off”, will not ensure the right people read the email. The email body copy above the fold has consistency with the subject line, re-enforcing and expanding on the deal details, in big bold letters.

The cost is clearly stated as well as the saving in percentage and pound terms. Customers know 65% is impressive so the percent value carries weight but as few people can work out how much 65% of £72 is, the pound discount is also needed to explain what a great deal it is. The urgency is clearly stated with the expiry date of the deal. The message is simple; act now.

The large ‘View now’ call to action button makes it obvious what you do next. The objective is just to get you to the landing page where there is further deal information. The email call to action is not ‘Buy Now!’ as the reader may not yet be at the point of having decided. The place for ‘Buy Now!’ is the landing page.

The Pony image messages what the offer is about. The images off email version needs some improvement as the ‘View now’ call to action is not visible because the button is purely image based.

Groupon CityDeals make deals relevant to you based on your location, they ask for city at time of sign up in one simple drop down box. This is not onerous during sign up and there is a clear reason why the consumer should provide the information.

Whilst location is a good criteria for relevance on many Groupon deals, it is also still quite crude. I’ve had these three deals offered in the last three days:

• Pony riding lessons
• Nine Holes of PGA professional golf tuition
• Medi-lipo weight management treatment

None of these are remotely relevant to me. With growing competition of daily deal providers, the customer experience needs improvement to avoid customer churn.

Deals clicked on or bought are the most obvious behaviour based relevance criteria to use for personalised deals. This is also limited. What if I’ve not yet purchased and can anyone predict that as I love Thai food I could be tempted to a skiing session, though golf is not my thing?

Asking customers for their interests through a preference centre is a must to improve relevance in most email programmes. In addition to preference centre a more pervasive experience could be achieved by using a ‘do not like‘ button. I’ve illustrated the concept by adding this into some unused whitespace on a Groupon email, creating the mockup below.

Just above the button in the mockup is the text ‘Tell us if you don’t want more deals like this in future’.

The idea is simple, next time I get a Medi-lipo offer I hit the ‘do not like’ button to say not more lipo deals please, it’s not relevant to me.

Expect to see more innovation in the daily deals space. Groupon aren’t standing still. They are launching a mobile app which focuses on two buttons, “I’m Hungry” and “I’m Bored”. It wants to answer those questions with time and location relevance at the point when you ask the question.

There are also social opportunities to improve customer experience by adding social aspects to the deal pages.

Now is the time to consider your own daily email programmes. The daily fix email is not yet a done deal.