Does The Early Bird Get The Group Buy?
I like routines. I set the alarm on my phone before bed. It goes off. I hit snooze. I hit snooze again. And then, on the third prompt, I turn off the alarm, sit up in bed, and thumb through the morning’s email on my phone.
If you subscribe to as many group buying services as I do, you’ll probably find an inbox full of daily deals. Every morning, most services deliver their email at a scheduled time, which is hours before I’m awake. And in my early morning fog, I skim the lump of deals and usually forget about them within minutes as I move on to my next task.
But every day, one service gets my full attention, simply because they aren’t on a set schedule. Sometimes their email comes late morning, other times early afternoon, but always after the early morning rush. Do they do it intentionally?
It’s a common marketing strategy to schedule emails and tweets around 9am to hit the rush of office workers during their morning routine. Since most of my group emails arrive between 6-7am, I started to wonder if it was just a case of eastern-based companies not paying attention to western time zones.
As a test, I signed up for a few of these services with Toronto as my location, and I found that the emails were adjusted for time zone, coming a few hours earlier, around 3-4am my time or still 6-7am local. So it appears to be a strategic attempt to appeal to our inner early bird to catch the deal worm, or simply let the early risers generate momentum and ‘tip’ the deal as soon as possible to maximize the buying window.
But in a saturated market, it’s not surprising that some are choosing to stand out with a more unpredictable approach. They may risk getting missed on a hectic day, but the staggered delivery has definitely demanded more of my attention.
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