Cox Enterprises has decided to keep Largo, Fla.-based Valpak in its corporate family after announcing last year that it was exploring its sale.
A number of factors no doubt went into this decision, including the likely dearth of offers during the sharp recession. However Valpak has begun to aggressively enter new forms of media - and Cox has said it believes it has a promising future in generating new sources of revenue with its digital products.
Among other changes, Valpak.com has been optimized for mobile phones. The company has also released an iPhone app and partnered with other Cox companies such as Kudzu.com - a relationship that allows consumers searching for savings on the Valpak.com site to view customer reviews and ratings of many local service providers.
Location Location Location
With its changes, Valpak has positioned itself well to ride the rapidly growing hyper local mobile and digital coupon trend. Still a niche space, demand for mobile coupons is growing rapidly - along with the new entrants and products.
For example 8coupons has morphed from its New York roots into a loaded database of more than 60,000 national mobile coupons and deals. The site has also significantly beefed up its location-based bona fides with new functionality. Now, when a user visits 8coupons.com, the map on the homepage will automatically populate the Top 8 most popular deals based on his or her IP address. This ensures that anyone who visits the site will see the deals that are most relevant to them specifically.
The Top 8 deals will change dynamically as the user moves the map around to different locations, zooms in on a specific street, or narrows down the deals by sub-categories such as restaurants, entertainment, beauty & spas, services and shopping.
8coupons.com, in fact, has partnered with Valpak, along with Money Mailer, and RedPlum's SuperCoups as well as with several local bloggers and content partners to add 50,000 local deals across the country.
Coupons On Demand
Recently-launched ChaChaCoupons.com offers another twist to this model. The site is getting set to introduce a "C3 on demand coupon service" that allows users to text in a request for coupons by business type or name and receive several offers back from ChaCha on their cell phone.
For example, customers may text "C3 pizza" or "C3 tanning" to 242242 and receive offers for pizza or tanning. Or, they may text in "C3 Cabo Sun" to see all of the current offers from the business Cabo Sun.
