One of the annoying things about e-mail marketing is that once you sign up for a few newsletters from your favorite stores, they quickly clog up your inbox. And those are the ones you opt in for. Add all the other retailers who somehow get your e-mail address and just send you digital flyers without asking, and it is no wonder more and more people simply ignore all of them. But when you are in a shopping mood and vaguely remember a sale for flat-panel TVs or kitchen appliances you saw somewhere, it takes forever to locate that particular e-mail newsletter again.
That’s where iStorez comes in, a new site that just launched today in beta. It takes all of those HTML e-mails that retailers send out and puts them on a Website where they can be indexed, searched, and organized. Anand Jagannathan, CEO of parent company Kriyari (his fourth startup—he also founded Banyan Systems and Responsys) argues:
The crux is e-mail marketing works. The reports show that consumers do respond to the shopping newsletters but email is the wrong medium. By aggregating thousands of newsletters on one site, then adding search, personalization and social networking, we have empowered consumers with a Personal Shopper that does all the work for them.
Actually, what he is saying is that e-mail marketing doesn’t work. You need to bring those messages to the Web and allow consumers to explore them in their own way when they are in a shopping frame of mind. On iStorez, you can shop by retailer or brand (Anthropologie, Brooks Brothers, J.Crew, Nike, Home Depot, Apple), by tag (jeans, Valentine’s, TVs), or customize your own virtual mall. You can also share a link to your mall on your own blog, Facebook, Myspace, Digg, Delicious, Stumbleupon, or various other social media sites. And in a few days you will be able to add an RSS feed with all the new deals from your stores.
I am not sure I’d go that far, but some people might, especially if iStorez ends up sharing the affiliate fees it collects with consumers who cobble together the best online malls. “That is the direction we are heading” Jagannathan tells me , “but we want to be a little careful.” Kriyari already does that with its storefront network, which lets Websites create custom shopping sections and shares a cut of the affiliate and CPA fees with them.
For iStorez, Jagannathan is playing around with different revenue models—affiliate deals, cost-per-click, cost-per-action (where the action is someone actually buying something). He thinks he can get 5 to 15 percent of any sales he generates in apparel, for instance, on a CPA basis. Electronics would be much lower. “We place all the links with affiliate codes,” he explains. “Eventually, to the retailer it is as if someone clicked on an affiliate link, but with a different creative.” In other words, he is turning those image-rich newsletter ads into affiliate ads. On a cost-per-click basis, he thinks he can get $0.25 per click. Overall, he is aiming for an effective CPM of $30 to $50 (i.e., for every thousand people who see a given promotion).
Kriyari was founded in July, 2006 and raised $2 million in an A round from Norwest Venture Partners.
He must be a wizard to have gotten the copyrights to reproduce all of those emails verbatim to their customers from all those companies. I can imagine the red tape doing that. Especially when companies like Apple literally go wild on people like this.
What do you mean when you say that “companies like Apple literally go wild on people like this.”
@2,
I mean that Apple goes wild on companies and or people that use their art out of context.
http://gizmodo....wful-171394.php
This sounds awfully redundant. There exists sites like ShopCartUSA, PriceGrabber, BizRate, PriceScan and NexTag that compare prices of a variety of merchandise. Consumers visit them, Amazon, CNET or individual merchandisers to buy product.
It doesn’t appear to me that Jagannathan’s addition to this universe is a valuable addition.
I disagree Akosua. I had never heard of iStorez before today and I study online commerce for a living. The moment I read this post I got up and started kicking myself for not having thought of this myself. In principle the idea is flawless, great job Anand.
I saw a site Adpera.com that was doing that a while back. It had less graphics but the same emails.
http://www.adpera.com/
Just wondering a bit about the logistics of all of this. How will iStorez get access to all the retail email newsletters out there? Will they just be on every subscriber list known to man and have a staff that reposts them to their website? Is there any issue with copyright like Chris is talking about? You’d think stores would appreciate the distribution, but some might not look at it that way.
My reply to their spam campaign references their own verbiage:
“iStorez is brought to you by a seasoned team at Kriyari” -
Well, as a channel marketing analyst, I can tell you that your seasoned team has steered you wrong by suggesting that you promote by spam.
@Alan
I’m not affiliated with iStorez but am in the email marketing space. Are you saying that retail newsletters are spam or are you referring specifically to a campaign that iStorez sent out?
Being in the email space it is very frustrating to see legitimate wanted advertising email being lumped together as “spam”. Unlike postal ‘junk mail’ if you call it, the vast majority of marketers only email you when you requested it. Sure there are overzealous or irresponsible marketers, but it is frustrating to listen to people who don’t subscribe to email advertisment (for one reason or another) to blatantly call all these emails spam.
Erick, thank you for the post.
#1, #3, #7 – Re. copyright issues
Retailers already send out product feeds and affiliate feeds so third parties can promote their site. We use the email marketing feeds and take great care to preserve the branding and the merchandising message. We do have relationships with a lot of the retailers.
#4 – Re. Price comparison sites
What iStorez brings is a “mall like” shopping experience where you browse and discover stores and products. Price comparison works great for technology and feature based products. What does shopping for “valentines” mean? Try some of these searches – valentine’s, spring fashions, coupons on iStorez and then on price comparison sites to see the difference.
#7 – Re. Logistics
No gnomes in the back room here. There is a “learning engine” that automatically processes incoming email, recognizes and catalogs legitimate marketing email (you can imagine the spam volume), indexes the contents and creates the visual storefronts. We also support stores sending us special feeds and there is an interface where a store can upload and post a storefront.
ran a test with Kiriya
made nothing
this iz lame
I just generate a new disposable email address for any place where I sign-up for a newsletter, forum registration or anything I buy online. Any emails get sent to the hidden real email account I designate. I can send attachments and my real designated email address is hidden on reply backs.
I use http://www.spamex.com and I get up to 500 email addresses at any one time for $10/year. If I find the company getting annoying or else sold my address, I just delete the email address.
It would be great if a service like this was integrated into Outlook.
Congratulations to Kriyari. I have been following the company since they launched the last iteration of the product Whatsbuzzing.
I think the fact that they’ve now added buyer profiles is key since if they start to catalog ALL retail emails it would make it pretty difficult to find what you want.
I can see users creating mini-malls within the site that caters to specific interests and users joining those malls during their free time to see the latest “buzz” or offer from the marketers that they are interested in.
wonder what the revenue stream looks like? Looks like a site I’ve seen before …http://www.adpera.com
You’d think stores would appreciate the distribution, but some might not look at it that way.
This is a VERY neat concept.
When marketing email messages hit my inbox, it is usually at a time when I am in no mood to look at them (e.g., in the morning at work).
Now I can just come here and quickly see the offers of interest to me *when* I am in a state of mind to shop.
Do coupons or marketing offer codes sent through e-mail work when used from an Istorez message?
I have new idea.
New startup aggregating all SPAM emails and send one really good SPAM
Do you guys think I will get funding for this great idea ?
this is the biggest load of BS i’ve seen in a while. Erick this story hurts your street cred man! not only is it *just* like thousands of other online shopping websites (search for “online mall” and you get 4 million hits) but let’s break down that terrible quote:
“The crux is e-mail marketing works. The reports show that consumers do respond to the shopping newsletters but email is the wrong medium.”
huh? email marketing apart from the medium of email is just..uh…content on a webpage. the medium is what makes it work. they push their content to you, instead of waiting for you to show up on their website. if these guys don’t even understand that, i see a bleak future for them.
an offline-parallel would be “direct mail marketing works, but the medium is wrong – instead of mailing people flyers, we should collect them all into a box and let them rummage through it in a mall parking lot…you know, when they’re in the mood to check out the deals.” it’s pretty obvious that won’t work, either. the whole f*cking point is to introduce you to crap that you weren’t going to buy! otherwise they wouldn’t need to advertise!
but good job getting written up on techcrunch, that counts for something i guess.
Hmmm…Have to agree with gilltots on this one.
I would be interested in coupons. You never seem to have them when you need them. Instead of hunting through email, it would make sense to go to a website and get Barnes & Noble coupons, for instance.
@20 Lucy – Try http://www.retailmenot.com/ They even have a Firefox plug-in.
Most retailers segment their offers dynamically based on customer lifecycle messaging. Aquisition, retention, recency, frequency, etc. For instance abandoned cart remarketing might be where you get the good coupons. Or reactivation for customers who haven’t bought in a few months. Or a welcome email coupon for new to list. Male v. female. AOV. Product category affinity mixes. I’m not sure how this site will tap into the dynamic nature which is flooding email marketing. Batch and blast is fading into the sunset. But it’s a neat idea, and I’ll be happy to root for them!
Hi Erick,
Great write-up on iStorez Personalized Shopping. I had the chance to get together with their CEO, Anand, to discuss their recent launch, figured your readers may be interested too.
Check it out our QandA interview here…
http://www.ecom...lized-shopping/
#17, #18, #19 – Email marketing is one of the most cost effective mediums for retailers to reach customers and 91% of retailers use it (refer to the Forrester/Shop.org study). It is not the delivery through email but the content of the message that provides value to customers. iStorez extends the delivery of the message to non customers who would see the same value when they are shopping. To use #18’s physical analogy, this is not about driving to the mall parking lot, but equivalent to the relevant sale flyers magically showing up in your mailbox when you are shopping for say a HDTV.
#22 – The iStorez technology is designed to leverage the segmentation of email marketing. We are working with retailers to deliver different storefronts based on demographics and behavior. So the service will present different storefronts to different visitors. One way to simply segment visitors is by identifying which of the built-in shopper profiles they choose. We can also segment further by analyzing the stores that a consumer adds to their shopper profile.
#23 – Thanks eCopt, for your detailed coverage of the iStorez service.
@ Anand – It’s always a pleasure to report quality applications and useful services, iStorez is just that. Congrats on the Techcrunch, Mashable coverage, bet that sent just a few visitors yesterday!
Given that a growing # of retailers in the email space are moving their email programs toward a more targeted, 1to1 orientation, with specific product feeds into emails based on a profile, preferences purchasing patterns or even surfing patterns, how is this going to reflect this in an environment that “archives” all email promotions. Are you archiving “EVERY” conceivable iteration? If so…how do you know what those iterations are?