Patroneer Blog Fixing Email Marketing's Fatal Flaw

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 CenterHaving 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 CatalogHaving 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 SummariesBy 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 LearningBeing 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 CurationHaving curators rank and categorize the promotions on the hub helps everybody by giving us much cleaner and organized feeds to follow.Proper IncentivesIn 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.