Patroneer Blog

The JC Penney Transformation - As Seen Through Marketing

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 21:07:50 -0700

There’s been a lot of coverage on JC Penney’s bold new, and evolving, strategy. One central theme has been on a marketing plan that replaced rampant sales and coupons with simple everyday discount prices. Changing consumer behavior has been difficult though, and JC Penney is slowly re-introducing parts of the classic pricing model.

We’ve pulled together the JC Penney ads into a timeline that depicts the abrupt switch and gradual evolution of their marketing strategy. You can see it at www.patroneer.com/articles/jcpenney.

Flip Edition for Tablets and Smartphones

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 16:53:00 -0700

Our daily report just got flippy. When you click the Flip Edition button at the top right of your report, it will open a special web app optimized for mobile devices. Now you can flip through your full-page deals just like you would a digital magazine. You can also read your latest deals (when you’re logged in) by visiting http://patroneer.com/flip.

Hotmail Taking On the Newsletter Battle

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 17:40:00 -0700

While most inbox providers have features that can mitigate the flood of email marketing, Hotmail has stepped up to address the problem head on. They even have a microsite dedicated to it.

Microsoft refers to all email newsletters, ads, offers, social updates and notifications as graymail. These messages are not technically considered spam because they’re from senders you do business with or have subscribed to. Since true, unsolicited spam rarely reaches the inbox anymore, graymail has become the big mess we have to deal with.

Microsoft’s graymail microsite pulls together great tips on how to isolate that mess.

Unsubscribe from a sender without jumping through hoops on their subscription page or waiting for them to process your request.
Automatically sweep messages from a sender into a custom folder.
Use a new address for your email list subscriptions and have those segregated into a dedicated folder.
Or just pull in an external email account that you already use to quarantine your email list subscriptions.

To be fair, other services like Gmail have similar features. I just wish they’d tie them together for a smoother experience with these scenarios, and do a more thorough job educating people on how to use them.

Kudos to the Hotmail team for taking a leading role here. But can you really conquer graymail using these features? The Hotmail and Gmail features let you segregate the graymail from your personal and work email. But if you want to discover great deals at the places you shop, you still need to read through a large number of lame announcements to find the few that are worthwhile.

That’s where Patroneer comes in. We read through all those retail announcements for you, and then highlight the ones that are truly special. Using the these Hotmail techniques to remove the graymail from your inbox, combined with a daily report from Patroneer to alert you of any specials at your favorite stores, gives you the complete toolset you need.

How Much Normal Email Do You Receive?

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 23:16:22 -0700

Looks like I should rephrase the question from my last post. Rather than ask how much email marketing do you receive, it might be easier to ask how much email do you receive from a person you know. Based on inbox data from Microsoft, only 14% are person-to-person messages. Ouch!

This tidbit came from a new ReturnPath report - http://www.returnpath.net/landing/globaldeliverability2h11/.

How Much Email Marketing Do You Receive?

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 16:04:00 -0800

Ever wonder what it would look like if you saved up years worth of email marketing and then compiled it all together in a collage? Yeah, probably not. But the end result is pretty fun nevertheless. You can play with the interactive artwork here.

-Rob

Improving the Signal-to-Noise Ratio

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 13:56:00 -0800

It’s a geeky way of looking at it, but the signal-to-noise ratio is the best metric for email marketing efficiency. This ratio compares the level of the desired signal to the level of background noise. If you send someone promotions they’re interested in, that’s signal. If you send someone an announcement they don’t think they need, that’s noise and you’re just wasting their time.

In email marketing today, the signal-to-noise ratio is very low. The vast majority of marketing messages are never opened, and less than 1 in 20 messages are ever clicked through. This makes it a chore for consumers to scan through each day’s messages to see if there’s anything worth exploring.

Patroneer suppresses the marketing noise with manual curation. We have real people look at each promotion, compare it to past offers and prior announcements, and determine if this is something worth alerting the people who follow the store. Here’s a picture story for how it works.

1) We track the promotions from each store. Here’s almost a month’s worth of announcements from one store.

2) Then our curators identify the first announcement of special sales. This filters out the background noise.

3) Your daily email from Patroneer will highlight any new specials from the stores you follow. The Specials section at the top of the report gives you a super-charged signal-to-noise ratio. That means you can find more deals with less effort.

-Rob

Fixing Email Marketing's Fatal Flaw

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 09:17:00 -0800

I’m an engineer by trade. I like to take things apart, figure out how they work, and find ways to improve them. When I started Patroneer, the first thing I did was dig into the end-to-end email marketing process to understand how it works. It wasn’t long before I spotted a fundamental design flaw. The current system is based on a direct-connect model, where marketers send promotions straight to individual consumers. We can all see the results of that model in our email inboxes - a cluttered mess of mostly unwanted messages.

Now let’s consider a different approach, where marketers publish promotions to a central hub where they can be browsed and subscribed to by consumers. I believe a hub-based system can fix many of the problems with email marketing and provide a more efficient channel between businesses and consumers. Here’s how:

Universal Subscription Center

Having a single place to manage our subscriptions to all marketing feeds is much easier than browsing to each store’s separate website and hunting for their subscribe and unsubscribe pages.

Unified Catalog

Having access to a global catalog of promotions from all businesses improves discovery. We can find deals from stores we’re not subscribed to, learn about stores we haven’t heard of, and “try before we buy” to see if a store’s feed is worth signing up for.

Consolidated Summaries

By pulling together all of the announcements from the stores we’re following into a single daily digest, we can eliminate the individual store messages scattered throughout our inboxes. We can process the daily summary in one quick pass, and not be bothered by random messages popping up throughout the day.

Shared Learning

Being able to see statistics on which promotions are popular with others and which are not helps us focus in on the most important announcements.

Central Curation

Having curators rank and categorize the promotions on the hub helps everybody by giving us much cleaner and organized feeds to follow.

Proper Incentives

In the direct send model, marketers are enticed to send more frequently to compete for attention at the top of our inboxes. In the hub model, businesses are rewarded only by offering great promotions that are popular and ranked highly by curators.

Patroneer is designed to transform the current direct-connect email marketing system into a hub-based model. It’s a big first step towards giving consumers the benefits of the features above, and I’m excited about how much further we can take it.

It's Official - We're All Email Masochists

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 14:34:00 -0800

I ran across some studies that confirm I’m not the only one with conflicted feelings about email marketing. A marketing agency named Merkle publishes an annual “View from the Inbox” whitepaper that surveys the habits of email users. The reports show that we are getting more commercial email in our inboxes than ever. The percentage of time spent processing the marketing messages versus other email jumped from 17% in 2005 to 30% in 2010. It’s now second only to the 37% of time spent with email from friends & family. The 2011 report hasn’t been published yet, so that gap could narrow or even flip.

What’s more, email is by far the most preferred method for consumers to receive their commercial messages. And that holds true across all age groups.

At the same time, the top two complaints about email marketers are sending irrelevant messages and sending too frequently. Why do we subject ourselves to the burden of so much unwanted email? For me, the reason is simple. Embedded in that noise is a great offer on something that I want to buy. I can either do the work to discover the deal, or I could give up and miss it.

I built Patroneer to give consumers a better third option. By working around the shortcomings of the email channel, we’re able to help consumers discover even more interesting deals in a fraction of the time they spend with their marketing mail. I will highlight those unique approaches in upcoming posts.

-Rob

(Charts from Merkle, View from the Digital Inbox 2011)

How to Manage Email Marketing

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 08:26:00 -0800

I have a love/hate relationship with email marketing. I love to discover great deals on the products I want to buy, but I hate the constant background noise of irrelevant and repetitive ads. This is what motivated me to create Patroneer and give consumers control over the promotions they want to see.

But even when using a service like Patroneer, consumers still receive email from businesses. Sometimes the messages are about a recent purchase, and other times they are advertisements. I’ve used a number of strategies to manage the commercial email in my inbox, and this is what I learned.

1) A Single, Universal Inbox

This is the default approach that everyone starts with. All personal and marketing email was sent to my one email address. The incoming mail was sorted by time, and I reviewed the messages in that order.

Advantages - Only one email address to remember.

Disadvantages - Absolute chaos. I had to read the marketing messages at the same frequency as I kept up with personal messages, and I had to switch context as I jumped from one type of message to another.

2) A Single, Organized Inbox

My next step was to try organizing the inbox mess using tools like inbox rules, Google Priority Inbox, Hotmail Sweep, and some third party services. They all work by routing different senders to separate inbox folders, such as Friends, Work, and Shopping.

Advantages - Only one email address to remember, and I could process the marketing email on a different schedule than my other messages.

Disadvantages - A never-ending quest to categorize all new senders. More on this at the bottom.

3) Separate Inboxes

When I wasn’t satisfied with the prior two options, I gave up and created a new email address that I only gave to my friends and colleagues. I now use my old account whenever I need to register an email address with a business. Clean separation of church and state.

Advantages - I can process the marketing email on a different schedule than my other messages.

Disadvantages - I have to remember an additional email address, and I must go to that separate inbox whenever I want to find a commercial message.

The Winner

Using separate inboxes for my commercial and personal mail works best for me. I tried to organize senders in a single shared inbox, but that was impractical. Businesses would send from changing email addresses, and I’d encounter new senders as I bought from different stores. I felt like I was categorizing new email senders on a daily basis.

With separate accounts and a daily summary of promotions from Patroneer, I’m only checking the commercial email when I need to find a receipt or shipping notice. I feel much better about my inbox now.

-Rob

Deal Scout

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 14:23:00 -0800

Keeping up with all the announcements from your favorite stores is a hassle, and most of us just don’t do it. Wouldn’t you love to have a personal assistant scout out the best deals for you? That’s the idea behind our newest feature - Deal Scout. Every day Patroneer reviews the latest promotions from the stores you follow. If they are offering a deal that’s exceptional, we will highlight it at the top of your personal flyer. Now it just takes a glance to determine whether there’s something special today that’s worthy of your attention.

-Rob