Too Much of a Good Thing? America’s Email Boxes Are Crammed with Deals, Now Blue Kangaroo Helps Us Spot the Keepers

America’s love affair with emailed deals is stronger than ever, survey finds, but overwhelmed consumers want help filtering the flood, clearing the clutter, and spotting the best deals – for which Blue Kangaroo hops to the rescue

BELLEVUE, Wash.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--With deal-of-the-day giants like Groupon and Living Social slowing their pace, are Americans showing “deal fatigue”? Quite the contrary, reports a new U.S. survey, which found that two out of three adults online maintain a “high” or “very high” interest in getting emailed offers from their favorite brands and daily deal services. Yet an even larger majority – four out of five – looks for help with the chore of sifting through their marketing emails to find suitable deals. Today, startup ChoozOn debuted a free service called Blue Kangaroo (www.bluekangaroo.com) to address this challenge. Developed by former executives from Yahoo!, the unique service gives consumers an easy way to scan all their marketing and daily-deal emails at a glance, alerts them automatically to incoming offers that match their individual interests, and moves the marketing clutter out of their personal inbox.

“sometimes worth the effort, but it’s a time-consuming chore.”

“People haven’t stopped loving deals in their email,” explained Nick Weir, CEO of ChoozOn, “but for nearly half of all Americans online, marketing correspondence makes up more than 50% of the volume in their inbox, and takes them anywhere from an hour to ten hours each week to review. That’s too much of a good thing, and consumers want help making sure the best deals don’t get overlooked in all that noise.” Weir noted that, “For these consumers, the Blue Kangaroo service operates like a choosy personal shopper for deals – it lets them review their offers more quickly, highlights the most tempting ones, and clears out the marketing clutter so that consumers can regain control of their personal inboxes.”

The national online survey, which was conducted on behalf of ChoozOn by Research Now and WebStar Research during August 23-27, 2012, consulted a representative sample of 1,090 U.S. adults aged 18-64. An overview of survey results is posted at www.bluekangaroo.com/research . Among the key findings:

• 35% of respondents said that, in the previous week, they had made use of a coupon or discount that they learned about through a marketing email. Another 33% had done so within the previous month.
• 48% agreed that reviewing marketing emails is “sometimes worth the effort, but it’s a time-consuming chore.”
• 47% of women felt that the amount of marketing emails they’d received in their most recent week was “somewhat more” or “much more” than they’d like.
• 42% of respondents said that, in the previous week, they opened and read most of the marketing emails they’d received, and another 30% said they didn’t “open most of them, but carefully read most of their subject lines.” The rest either skimmed a few subject lines or ignored and deleted the marketing emails they got.
• 69% of respondents worried that inbox clutter might be causing them “occasionally,” “fairly often,” or “all the time” to overlook deals that they would have liked.
• Americans like marketing emails from favorite brands, but loathe unsolicited marketing “spam.” Angry consumers endorsed harsh punishments for professional spammers:
  • 65% would permanently block their internet access
  • 14% would impose long jail sentences
  • 8% would “remove some of their typing fingers”
  • 7% would “bring back the medieval rack”

The Blue Kangaroo service was built with these concerns in mind, helping to ensure that consumers don’t overlook – and don’t need hours to find – the best offers and savings in their daily email clutter. The service features:

Deals at a glance. Gives consumers an easy way to scan quickly down a single page that contains all the marketing emails they’ve received over the last few days. Instead of having to work through 15 or 20 different emails, consumers receive just one daily email from Blue Kangaroo that summarizes all of their incoming offers in picture-rich, side-by-side displays.

Alerts about the best offers. The service alerts consumers to deals that match their interests. Offers that Blue Kangaroo thinks the consumer should pay special attention to are highlighted as “recommended” in their Blue Kangaroo Inbox, and in the daily email Update they get from the service.

Everything in one tidy place. The service neatly archives all of the consumer’s marketing emails in their Blue Kangaroo Inbox. They can browse the complete set at any time, conveniently organized by brand, and easily searchable. The service automatically reminds the user about possibly relevant marketing emails at the right times, when they’re actually shopping for related products and services.

Cleaner inbox. Blue Kangaroo automatically moves marketing emails out of the consumer’s Yahoo mail or Gmail inbox, leaving it free of marketing clutter. All the emails are safely stored, both in their Blue Kangaroo account, and in a backup folder of the user’s personal inbox.

The ability to vet and manage marketing emails is just the newest dimension of the personalized deal-discovery service now called Blue Kangaroo, which was in beta test under the ChoozOn name for more than a year. The service scours the deal universe for offers that match the individual product and brand preferences of its customers, and draws upon more kinds of deals than any other service does, including deals of the day, national brands, deep discounters, flash sales, loyalty programs, and local merchants. Blue Kangaroo includes powerful tools for deal search, and lets consumers “follow” boards for deals related to any product or brand of interest to them. Blue Kangaroo services are currently available on the web, on browser toolbars, and on mobile applications.

About ChoozOn and Blue Kangaroo

ChoozOn Corporation develops solutions for personalized deal search, discovery, and recommendation under the Blue Kangaroo brand. The company is founded by leading digital marketing and data experts Nick Weir, Usama Fayyad, and Hunter Madsen, who helped shape the strategy of organizations that include Yahoo!, Audience Science (formerly digiMine), Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, MicroStrategy, NASA, Wired, and J. Walter Thompson.

For more information, visit www.bluekangaroo.com and follow us on Twitter (@blueroodeals, @choozon).