Zima Blog

Marketing – Our Prototype, Chitown Deals

Written by Alen Malkoc Tuesday, 06 April 2010 13:28

Welcome to this week’s blog post. Many of you know us through one of our marketing prototypes, Chitown Deals. We established ChitownDeals.com sometime last year. Our goal to get into email marketing played a huge role in the development of this hyper-local marketing concept.

Our initial stints at email marketing were somewhat successful. Our goal was to build our email lists by creating sites that would allow us to find a niche customer base. While we continued to find our niches and building these customer bases, we thought to ourselves: Why don’t we give the small guys a chance? Nobody else is doing it (at least that we knew of)!

Basically, the idea evolved into this. Instead of doing one offer nationwide, why don’t we just parse our userbase and e-mail a local offer to users in 5 mile vicinity. To make it appealing, we would ask the businesses to offer a coupon through the mailing.

The problem became that we wanted to guarantee a business something and regardless of good potential numbers, there was no way for us to track the performance of customers using the coupons.

Hence, this concept evolved into the idea of Chitown Deals. We basically emulated the Groupon model, or many other predecessors’ (i.e. Mercata), to make it easier on us to track our sales. The rest is history (or present).

If you are a local business owner, we can help you get some good exposure in Chicago! We currently reach over 25,000+ Chicagoans on a daily basis. There are, now, many competitors (as they call themselves) in Chicago. All are looking to serve you, but we can say the following things that will make you like us (maybe):

• We encourage you to get featured on other sites as well – It doesn’t hurt you or us. Many of us have different demographic user bases, that multiple features will manifest your “daily deal” campaigns. Keep in mind that less than 3% of the entire U.S. population knows about these sites. I’m sure you’d like to reach all 3% or even more (97% ).
• We don’t charge you a crazy 50% split. That standard will soon be obsolete. We charge you a straight, up-front and open, 25% commission. We understand that you are giving away to attract the consumers and we want to help. A 25% is fair (we believe) just so that we can cover our expenses and make some money. After all, we want a long lasting relationship. Self Note – Keep in mind that if one customer comes back, that makes 2. ;)
• We cap our commission at $500 per deal. (This might change later on but for now, we like that.)
• We don’t ask you to sell 5,000 Deals at 40 – 80% Off. Maybe just 50 or a 100.
• If you are ready to play with the Big Boy (i.e. Groupon), try us first. It’s better to see if you will have luck with the promotion or marketing concept at a smaller level, rather than blowing 10s of thousands of dollars. Play is safe and smart. ;) They aren’t going anywhere.
• We keep your info on our site. Some people will get to our site by browsing and finding out about you. Yes, other’s do it too, but not all of them.
• Nothing bad about working with the “little guys” – After all, most of you are small businesses as well. Aren’t we right?

We will be launching a nationwide product that will be more sustainable to all. More info on that coming soon. So, if you are in the city or burbs (Chicago) and love to be featured, feel free to drop us a message at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Until next time,

Your Zima Team