Cupons, innovation and B2B with Oportunista

This week we talked with Rodrigo Giménez-Rico Laguna, head of Customer Acquisition and Retention at Oportunista, a Spanish coupon platform that has more than a decade of existence. Rodrigo presented the company to our audience, what differentiates them from other coupon platforms and the potential of B2B sales. Check out our interview below.

Please present Oportunista to our audience.

Oportunista is a company born in Madrid, Spain, in 2009. It’s a free coupon download platform. In 2012, we launched our first mobile app, which became number one in the Spanish Apple Store. At the time, this was important to us, since we were in touch with big franchises, restoration, and health and beauty businesses.

Around 2018, we launched a B2B department because we realized many companies wanted to do a loyalty program based on our platform. So, we started to fundraise the platform for appliances, targeting major insurance companies such as Santa Lucía or banks like BBVA.

Now, we are focusing on retail: building and managing loyalty programs for shopping centers and malls. Since we have the technology and the know-how of how to create a discount platform, we can distribute them and create interesting content, so that clients get to a loyalty program that works.

How does your B2B platform work?

At the beginning, we’d “clone” the original platform to B2B, but it was complicated to manage because at the end we’d have a few different platforms. We needed to go through an evolution, making 5 or 6 different useful platforms.

So, we reconsidered the whole strategy and relaunched the same platform with brand new technologies. It includes a multisite technology, which allows us to use the same core for all clients but creating different front ends to adapt to the different branding approaches. Also, we can share discounts or place 1 to 8 key account managers to get the content specifically for clients.

How does Oportunista create a different service approach in its segment?

We started naïvely, creating a business in which the main benefits were to users and merchants. We are the platform between them. Groupon started intermediating every payment, which was very good for them but was not so good for merchants, and later for users. So, they failed in Spain.

In Oportunista, we decided to remain as naïve as initially, by not intermediating payments. You can download coupons for free and obtain discounts by presenting them and paying directly to the merchant. We charge the merchant to distribute coupons, instead of charging the user.

This approach helps us because some big franchises would never go to a Groupon-kind of model because they know it is good for the platform but not for them. So, we are able to have all those clients plus the small ones.

It’s true that Groupon’s approach was very interesting initially: if it brought people to the merchant, they’d be paid, but it would be for free if not – whereas we proposed they had to pay to be on our platform. In the end, people tried both and we were more profitable for merchants and more user-friendly to customers.

What is your audience mostly interested to consume?

The main sectors are restaurants, mainly fast food. Then, beauty salons and hairdressers, from small to big franchises. Finally, tourism – hotels. Then, we have a lot of other things, such as car repairs, movie theaters and amusement parks.

What do you look for in partners to offer something valuable to customers?

Our approach requires the merchant to present a profitable promotion. We don’t seek high discounts, which are not sustainable or just publicity stunts. Usually, a 10% to 40% discount would be OK. The conditions need to be as wide as possible, so that users get more value – applying the promotion to a set of goods instead of on one specific model of goods, for instance.

Oportunista is completely self-manageable by merchants, but we have a marketing team ready to help define a promotion that is good both for the merchant and the customer. To offer a promotion is an opportunity given to customers to try your product and service, and, if they like, they’ll come back for more.

What opportunities do you see for Oportunista in the next 3 or 4 years?

Oportunista has reached a level of organic growth in which our clients are satisfied with our performance, so I’d like to expand the service to big customers. Also concerning B2B, I’d like to work with more clients, since we are now focused on shopping malls and managers mainly.

I have always been thinking about making an international expansion. For that, I want to find the right partner to manage and provide this type of content, instead of doing all this operation by myself. It could be a B2C model. We have the technology, so we’d need to find a partner able to reach and get merchant content and user traffic.

We’ve been thinking a lot about this, and I think a media, telephone or commercial company would be a good partner. With our technology and their know-how and people we can create value. Also, I’m open to proposals for the B2B model. Right now, I’m speaking with a big firm in South America that wants to launch a program for their mobile network.