Gregory Kim, Chief Revenue Officer at Slickdeals, talks about how the website grew into the Top150 US-websites. For him, „Social is the winning business model!“
Slickdeals uses Social Commerce and Crowdsourcing, which allows the best deals to surface, influenced by community votes and comments. This leads to more sales for the merchant, and lower customer acquisition costs.
The site started in 1999 and grew slowly. Once the community grew enough and reached its inflection point, it started growing by itself. Until 2012, the company grew organically and virally without, and then they added paid advertising to the mix – now Slickdeals has more than 9 million unique visitors each month.
This is how Slickdeals.com works:
- Great deals get posted by members
- The community votes on it
- Deal editors curate the content
- Consumers get huge savings, merchants generate incrementals sales and new customers
The secret sauce
- Content and value is king – design is secondary, the social aspect is the competitive advantage.
- Quality and trust is the #1 job – merchants are not allowed to post deals, the community combined with the expert team are responsible for the content.
- Community feedback loops – not-great content will get voted down.
- Social is not easy, but the ROI is powerful! It is difficult to build social at scale.
The recommendation is obvious: Incorporate Social and Mobile in your business!