At the E-mail Controls with… Groupon’s Andrew Kordek

Implementing e-mail deliverability reporting, launching a welcome program, tweaking headers: Groupon’s speed-of-light growth is keeping Andrew Kordek busy. As the manager of e-mail optimization for the online collective-buying club, Kordek has seen its database swell from 1.2 million e-mail subscribers in October 2009 to 5.5 million. That translates to about 1 billion e-mails a year. And the growth will almost certainly continue as Groupon expands into new markets.

Groupon offers subscribers daily deals based on the locations they select. So far it is in roughly 60 U.S. markets; Kordek says it hopes to be in more than 100 markets in the States and Canada by year’s end. And last month it acquired Citydeal, a similar business operating in 16 European countries.

Each market is in effect its own list, with e-mails featuring the day’s deals for that particular locale. Most of the markets are sent an e-mail every weekday, though some receive e-mails seven days a week. Each is transmitted at 5 a.m. local time, and because each deal ends at midnight, efficient, reliable deliverability is critical.

At the moment Kordek is the sole Groupon employee handling e-mail deliverability. One of his first steps upon joining the company last autumn was to contact deliverability-tools provider Pivotal Veracity, now part of Unica. In addition to the provider’s eDesign Optimizer, to ensure that all e-mails render properly across a span of clients, Kordek uses its eDelivery Tracker, along with tools from ExactTarget, to monitor deliverability issues.

Kordek receives reports from the solutions on an hourly basis, “so that we can immediately take an offensive rather than a defensive route.” If, say, he sees a rise in bounce rates from a particular domain, he can have someone get in touch with the ISP before the rise turns into a more serious spike.

Fortunately, Kordek says, “the e-mail program was in pretty good shape” when he arrived at Groupon. “The 1.2 million subscribers at that time were very Chicago-centric, they were good clean lists, and people were very engaged.”

To maintain that sense of engagement, the Groupon e-mails feature editorial content along with their deals. A recent e-mail for the New York market promoting a discount for an Italian restaurant, for instance, included a link to a brief tongue-in-cheek article about how to propose to one’s girlfriend in style (the featured restaurant is apparently a popular place for men to pop the question); another, offering deals for a vegan café, linked to a humorous item conjecturing about the origins of soy. The e-mails also link to in-depth descriptions of the featured vendors, complete with testimonials.

“Our editorial staff is enormous,” Kordek says. “They literally do these write-ups for all 60 cities each and every day. We do an excellent job of writing things up because we take the time.”

The company takes the time to listen as well as to communicate. For example, Kordek recently added to each e-mail customized preheaders with the name of the particular market in response to frequent travelers and other customers who opt in to receive messages for multiple cities.

Among other changes Kordek has introduced in the past eight months is “a proper welcome e-mail.” He also added an unsubscribe link to the top of each message as well as on the bottom. “If you’re a subscriber and you don’t want to be on our list anymore, why should we make it difficult for you to unsubscribe?” he reasons. The additional link has reduced the number of spam complaints Groupon receives from ISPs, he notes.

“E-mail marketing is not a one-way communication,” Kordek insists. “You need to take yourself out of the company and put yourself in the subscriber’s shoes. As a marketer, you’re not in charge of the e-mail; your subscriber is. Let the customer and subscriber dictate how you should run your e-mail program.”