Lincoln IGA Joins LDN in the Electronic Age

[February 14, 2008]  Lincoln Daily News and IGA have a new program to help you save money. On the front page of this electronic newspaper you will notice an advertisement for Lincoln IGA, but it is more than just an image advertising the store.

Click on the ad and you will be sent to a coupon site. These pages carry the latest great money-saving offers from our "hometown proud" grocery store, and can be printed out and used as you would any coupon printed and distributed in other ways.

The use of Internet content sites to distribute special offers isn't brand-new, but it is still in its early stages of growth. With sites such as LDN, businesses can use ad dollars wisely to draw interest to their business ad and then, with a simple click, redirect readers to a company's own online site, where literally pages and pages of information are available. It is this ability to spend smaller amounts on advertising, all the while delivering more information, that has caused Internet advertising to grow exponentially.

Charlie Lee, co-owner of the IGA along with Bill Campbell, isn't what one would call an "Internet savvy" individual. In fact Lee professes, "I'm still trying to catch up with the 1980s. But I look at advertising as an investment, and advertising is how we tell people what we have on sale, and that's what brings them into our store."

Lee is being modest in his explanation. The store, since 1990 when Lee and Campbell purchased it, has been a friend to literally hundreds of worthwhile civic and charitable causes in this community, and residents shop at the store as a small way of saying thank you for all the help this locally owned and operated grocer does for the community.

In many ways the Lincoln IGA is still an old-fashioned grocery store. There are no self-checkout lanes, and groceries are still carried out to your vehicle for you. But Lee understands that many of his customers who enjoy these amenities are also members of the cyber world and is reaching out to them.

"The coupons we have on the Lincoln Daily News page have some exceptional savings. They are prices that we can only offer so many times in a year," Lee explained.

"Unlike many businesses, the IGA can tell when an ad works," he continued. "The coupons in the register tell us if people are responding to the ad. It tells us if the ad worked."

There are a great many benefits to having the coupons available online. First is their availability to anyone without needing to purchase any publication to get them. Secondly, they are always there. A person rummaging through the house looking for the coupons they misplaced is now a thing of the past. At any time, you can always go online and print them again. You can also print multiple copies to distribute to family and friends who still haven't joined the Internet world.

In order to help readers save more money, the coupons are available to be printed in black-and-white to save color ink in the printer for important things like pictures of family members, friends or that exceptionally handsome rib roast you recently purchased at IGA.

[By MIKE FAK]

Readers can find more of Mike Fak's writing at www.searchwarp.com and www.problogs.com.