Groupons model has always been to serve to up a single daily deal per city, per day. Yesterday, the company nearly reinvented itself when it kicked off its Personalized Deals initiative.
With Personalized Deals, Groupon subscribers in Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Jose, Seattle and New York City will receive deals tailored to their personal tastes and previous purchase behaviors. Groupon subscribers who complete their on-site profile can also help the service better understand their preferences.
The blog post on the update describes the personalization process as one that matures over time. “Like a baby, Personalized Deals will start out dumb, but like a baby dipped in some sort of mutating ooze, Personalized Deals will get smarter quickly. As Groupon gets to know you better, we’ll target your inbox with scarily accurate deals and scarily accurate hand-drawings of you.”
Personalized Deals marks a massive shift in ideology, significantly upping the quantity of deals the company can present to users on a daily basis and pointing to even more growth potential.
The most obvious reason for the switch to personalized deals is a matter of simple supply and demand. Groupon Founder Andrew Mason claims that the site has more than 35,000 merchants queued up to be featured, and that most clients who make the site clamor to be featured again. He attributes the site’s inability to meet merchant demand as the primary reason why copycats are able to build competitive services. Personalized Deals introduces a way for the company to keep merchants from going elsewhere.
Of course, Personalized Deals should also help the site attract more men with deals better suited to their masculine needs. Women may be primarily responsible for Groupon’s growth, but now Groupon can avoid alienating potential male buyers with predominantly female-friendly deals.
Hat-Tip to Mashable.com
