As the owner of Premier Integrative Medicine, an acupuncture clinic in New York City, Humberto Toledo has struggled to generate walk-in traffic without a street-level storefront. To combat this issue, Toledo now uses Signpost to run regular deals and incentives to attract new customers, and says the company is less "intimidating" to work with than competitors like Groupon and LivingSocial...

Lipof Advertising creative director Nathan Lowery says businesses that inundate their customers with meaningless marketing messages are actually doing more harm than good. In his experience handling advertising and marketing for Pet Supermarket, Lowery has noticed that customers are less likely to unsubscribe from SMS advertising lists when they're sent messages that have actual value, like coupons and discount codes...

Ray Chang, the founder and CEO of The Motorsport Lab, was excited about the prospect of running his first Groupon offer in 2010. What he wasn't expecting was the crush of phone calls that resulted. To help decrease the pressure on his staff, Chang started using Genbook to handle online reservations. Since then, he's been able to run three subsequent deals without overburdening his employees...

At Molly's Salads in Seattle, Washington, founder Stefan Kalb needed an easy way to collect payments from customers without being present in person. His solution? Seconds, a mobile commerce platform that customers can use to pay via text message...

As the co-owner of Kreatelier, a retail shop that sells gifts and textiles in Providence, R.I., Line Daems is always on the lookout for ways to reward her most loyal customers without overwhelming her staff with extra work. In 2011 she discovered that she could use Swipely, a loyalty platform tied to customers' credit card transactions, to offer cash-back rewards with zero effort on her company's behalf...

How does an established media company break into the daily deals market? At SourceMedia Group in eastern Iowa, vice president of sales Chris Edwards turned to Second Street for a private-label deal platform that was high on flexibility and low on administrative costs...

MomentFeed worked with Cinnabon to merge duplicate venues, adjust inaccurate geo-codes, and update venues with correct addresses and consistent branding. The result? Cinnabon corporate communications manager Rachel Hadley says the company has seen a nearly 700% increase in customer engagement on Foursquare, Facebook, and Twitter over the past eight months...

How much is a new customer worth? At Rok Bistro in Sunnyvale, Calif., owner Steve Wright decided the customers he was getting with Groupon offers and old media advertisements weren't worth the amount he was spending. Instead, he's decided to re-targeting existing customers using a self-service platform called Fanminder...

Ryan DeJong, founder of the gooroo group marketing agency, used Closely to create a series of daily deal offers for the Pineapple Day Spa in Pine Bush, N.Y., (pop. 1,780). DeJong has found that small town customers are just as eager to jump on the daily deal bandwagon as their big city counterparts, and that customers are more responsive to limited-time deals than the generic discount codes spas typically send out in email blasts...

Kate Carrara, owner of Buttercream, a cupcake truck in Philadelphia, tapped into the daily deals craze in 2011 with campaigns through both Groupon and LivingSocial — which she'll never do again. "I think I’ve saturated the market with it. I did it solely for the marketing," she says, pointing to the 9,000 Twitter followers accumulated after the Groupon deal. Since then, she's also used Xipwire and LevelUp to combine hyperlocal marketing and commerce, two experiments with open outcomes...