Infographic: What the Daily Deals Market Looks Like in 2012

Constant Contact, the email-marketing veteran that went public in 2007, has released an infographic to promote its new local deals play SaveLocal. The graphic makes the case for a new generation of deals, in which offers are created by, not sold to, local merchants.

The publicly traded company has been on an acquisition tear of late, snapping up back-end deals solution Mob Manager in January and mobile deals play Cardstar in March. With inbox placement rates decreasing, the company appears to be looking to expand beyond its bread-and-butter email marketing business into a one-stop small business-marketing platform.

“The current model is fundamentally broken,” Dave Gilbertson, VP & GM of SaveLocal, told Street Fight in an email. “The new model starts with your current customers — those who are most likely to recommend you — and rewards them for sharing the deal with their friends and networks, who tend to be highly qualified customers for you.”

In many ways, the SaveLocal model is a return to one of the fundamentals of group buying in the social distribution element. Before the deal market exploded, the voucher minimum incentivized users to share the deal with friends; the growing popularity of companies like Groupon (and their massive consumer-facing marketing efforts) diminished the need for users to market the deal.

SaveLocal has reintroduced the social element by enabling merchants to incentivize existing clients to share through further offers.

The concept of local deals has been around for a while, but – particularly for the national players – local and particularly mobile products have not lived up to expectations.

Steven Jacobs is an associate editor at Street Fight.

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