But I don’t mind admitting I still seek out daily or weekly email newsletters that can show up in my inbox on a regular schedule so I can consume them when I’m good and ready. The problem for me, as a guy who’s constantly on-the-go?

Way too many email newsletters just aren’t readable on an iPhone. Including those from resources “connecting the marketing community”, those providing “digital intelligence”, and news sources aimed at advertising, marketing, and media professionals.

Apple has sold well over 100 million iPhones already, and plans to sell that many in 2012 alone.  There are another 200+ million Android phones floating around out there already as well.

Yet, seriously, I have to use two fingers to expand an email to read just the headlines, let alone the content? And it doesn’t get any better if I CLICK on a headline to see a specific article in my iPhone’s browser. Tiny text formatted for a full PC screen. Surely, you’ve experienced this.

The content may be high-quality, the opinions riveting…but what ends up happening most often is I delete the email instantly on my iPhone, or it gets deleted eventually from my desktop when I go into email-cleanup-mode in Outlook.

That’s a shame for those people who go to such great lengths to create compelling content for people like me.  It gets lost in the shuffle…over something as simple as formatting. Some designer got overly ambitious, or overly cute and design-y, and created a template for the editors to use.

Nice work. You did your employer a disservice, making it harder for them to connect with their audience.

I’m ranting here, but I’m actually amazed at just how out of mind this notion is to the people behind the newsletters. Do they even try to read their own newsletters on a smartphone??

Bottom line: if you distribute a company email newsletter to prospects, customers or an E-club of some kind, do yourself a favor, make it streamlined. Ditch the multi-column, rigid-font-size formatting. Make it, you know, actually readable, usable, and actionable from a smartphone.

As you peruse that site, of all the relevant, targeted ads you’re going to see see strewn about the webpages, wouldn’t you love for some of those were ads on local deals, not just local businesses?

Yes, Patch local sites have their own deals, I get that. They display for me in a ribbon under the logo, when available. But I’m talking about a standardized ad where you can get the deal gist in one quick glance and act on it. Okay, so, I’m not a graphic designer, but the ad to the left is a bare-bones example of what I’m thinking.

There’s a market for a massive ad network that works like Google’s — AdWords on one side for those wanting their deals published, AdSense on the other for those wanting a bit of revenue for publicizing the deals — but isn’t tied to one provider’s deals, like, say Groupon or LivingSocial.

Google’s platform can be used for this today, but I’m talking about one where the ad itself is formatted for easy review by the reader, consistent across a multitude of websites, and hyperlocal.

I think the best company positioned to do something like this is Signpost. Why? Their concept is what Groupon should have been, in my opinion: client-selected deal parameters, client-selected time windows for the deal.

What Signpost is, without this idea, is awesome. I want them to be successful. They’re doing it the way it should be done. Not heavy-handed. Client-focused. This is a killer platform for local merchants.

The thing is…people love their deals. Local merchants love wide publicity for their establishment, but don’t (shouldn’t) like giving away 75% of their revenue on a deal. And AdSense is widespread on personal blogs and websites.

To me, this is a perfect combination.

Does this exist already, and I’m just unaware?

"Full Price" image lovingly borrowed from the Massachusetts family music band by the same name. Click on the image to check 'em out.

If you’re a retailer, whether it’s with one or many locations, you want customers.

(Captain Obvious comin’ at ya live with that last sentence.)

But you should also have an expected average ticket price. Meaning, if you can count on, let’s use a round number, 500 people dropping in your store or restaurant on an average week day, you expect them to pay, on average, $X per transaction. It helps you forecast.

And that’s my problem with Groupon and the other large-scale daily deals sites.

When you run a Groupon campaign, you are destroying an important metric — whatever that average $X per transaction is — while thinking another metric will rescue it in the long-term — incremental improvement in traffic.

A recent study (PDF link) suggests that it isn’t just short-term metrics that blow up. You’ve got discounting reputation issues coming into play — where new and existing customers begin looking at your venue as a discount-house. Geez Louise, that’s a major, long-term reputation problem.

You want more customers paying full price. With Groupon and related deals, what you’re getting is a tidal wave of customers paying a fraction of it — and expecting that deal-making mindset from your establishment going forward, while still demanding perfect and personalized customer service. And when they don’t get it? These socially savvy customers BLOW UP ON YELP ABOUT IT.

Your best bets are marketing initiatives that give you:

1. Consistent new traffic, and/or
2. Increased frequency of loyal customer visits, along with
3. Little to no discount.

Isn’t that the holy grail?

(Insert your reply: “Duh. If only such a thing existed!”)

The answer is to provide a killer product, compelling customer experience, and wrap that up in a way where customers can share that experience with their social network. Ta da! It’s that simple! Just add water!

Maybe you need your own iPhone app with check-in capabilities. Maybe you need to more fully leverage Foursquare. And okay, I’ll just get it out there…maybe, if you’re a bar or restaurant with televisions, you just need to go the Buzztime route (see my About page).

These are partial answers though, actually. The bigger point: you need to think through this whole notion of partnering with some aggregator to promote your daily deals. You don’t want the hope for more loyal customers to be swallowed up by the fact that the ones you’re guaranteed to get with Groupon, LivingSocial, et al., will pay 75% less than the rest of your customers.

Restaurant owners, you’ve got so many killer marketing options emerging right now.

So much so, you should be foaming at the mouth to jump on one. Or biting at the bit. Or whatever more appropriate metaphor works here.

Do you want your own iPhone app? It’s available for little cost. 

Do you want to start a SMS campaign with a vendor that’s focused on the restaurant industry? It’s available… 

Do you want to accept mobile payments? Available…

Do you want to set the terms by running your own daily deals program? Available…

Do you want your own online ordering system? Available…

And how about getting a clear, numbers-driven view on how each of your social media outposts are doing for you right now? Available…

There’s a whole laboratory of extremely compelling solutions that are emerging right now (“laboratory” chosen on purpose, given that some of these aren’t even yet available to everyone).

And I’m not just talking about the big brands, who can drop $10,000 here or $20,000 there to hire digital agencies to put custom promotions or apps together. Nor am I talking about solutions you’ve already heard of, like Yelp, OpenTable, Foursquare, and so on.

Those are yesterday’s news. They’re ugly. Let’s go mobile. Let’s go custom. Let’s get local. Let’s help little guys, too.

While I’m building a larger go-to list for creative and brand-differentiating solutions, in this post we’re talking some cutting edge stuff that goes beyond creating a social media account and tweeting or posting your life away or devising ways to merely amass fans and followers with no plan beyond that. Put your marketer’s cap on here, operators. Here’s just a quick glance of a few solutions to keep an eye on or investigate:

There’s Locu, which is building a killer platform for bringing your restaurant and menu to life online. Upload your menu in nearly any file format, add your own daily deals, come up big when consumers conduct local searches to find a place to eat.

How about TextOrder.net, which is launching a system that allows customers to place orders via text message.

Textaurant helps you alert waiting customers when their table is ready…also via text message. Ditch the pagers, message consumers on the very devices they’ve got in their hands already. Consumers can also use the system to see what your wait time is online, or join the queue without being there.

Fork.ly is rolling out a compelling mobile experience that allows you to stand out when people use their smartphones to find cool places to eat, with detailed analytics built-in.

You’ve got Skipola building custom iPhone apps  in which restaurants can manage a menu, allow consumers to place orders from their smartphones, and send those consumers messages/notifications from within the app.

Then there’s Digital Menubox and its sweeping solution that allows you to: a) Manage a professional outdoor digital signage solution, and/or b) Update that digital signage, or your website, or your Facebook page, or your Twitter feed, with a killer, back-end system that even allows you to pre-schedule when your tweets, Facebook posts,  positive reviews and daily deals go live. A couple sentences don’t do justice to what Olivier’s team is building up in Canada. I’ve had a chance to walk through this first-hand.

AisleBuyer, TabbedOut, YWaiter, and Storific are among many tackling mobile payments in different ways. With some of these folks, you become a part of their ecosystem — one of many locations in their directory, willing to accept payments made through their app. With others, you get a custom-built smartphone app branded for you that allows you to take orders without a credit card passing hands.

RelevantMobile is a mind-blowing CRM system for restaurants unlike any other I’ve seen. Imagine an online dashboard in which you can see an overview of your customers’ dining frequency, average spend per visit, and locations visited. One in which you can then build incentives for customers when they achieve certain dining milestones. The prerequisite? Customers use your custom-built smartphone app to scan their receipts. Sounds funky, but checking-in was unheard of, what, three years ago?

If you’re looking to allow customers to place orders online, but lack any tech know-how to get this going, you’ve got OLO. Streamlined system for customers, Point-of-sale integration for you. And what’s that they say? If Five Guys is doing it, it can’t be wrong.

Revenizer is a web-based dashboard that allows businesses to get a one-page glance at a variety of social media follower metrics and Google Analytics. I’ve tested this baby out and really like how clean and simple, and therefore actionable, it is. Restaurant brands who care about how their social media and website analytics are evolving month to month or week to week will like this service. It’s also dead-simple to setup. We’re talking minutes.

And then we’ve got Appetizer. There’s something about what they’re building that I really love. I want you to picture your small-town, single-location restaurant launching its own, custom-built iPhone app that is thoroughly and completely Facebook-integrated. Not only will it pull in all your Facebook page info, it will allow you to launch daily deals, record consumer check-ins, and manage reservation-booking. All of this for $20/month. Seriously cool.

This list isn’t complete and doesn’t cover many other game-changing technology solutions that can help restaurants — whether independents or chains — differentiate from one another and add value to consumers’ dining routines while increasing sales.

Is there a heavy emphasis on mobile? Uh huh. Is that a hint that it’s time to capitalize on people living on their smartphones? Uh huh. Is it a coincidence that I’m posting this around the same time that troubled Groupon is on the verge of pulling their IPO off the table? No, I promise.

It’s time for restaurant owners to really think like marketers. Yeah, you could look to spiffying up your menu and, I don’t know, start offering hot Kool-aid or something. Or you can make a gutsy decision and put your first foot forward in marketing your restaurant in a whole new way.

Salespeople should read it. Marketers. Even brand managers.

The problem with too many in those three populations is that they’re so wrapped up in their own worlds — their products’ features, their services’ benefits, their tech specs, their retail experience — that they talk in their own language, yet still expect everyone to perk up when they start yapping.

There’s no discovery. No surveying. No needs assessment. And there’s no true understanding before the talking and selling begin.

We’ve all been guilty of this at some point or another. We’re so amped-up, biting at the bit, to say what we want to say in the way we planned to say it, that we give no thought to either asking questions to see things from the others’ perspective.

Let alone frame what we’re going to say in a context that with the very people we’re hoping to influence.

So here’s wisdom: don’t do this.

Speak the language of your target audience. Do it in writing. Do it conversation. But don’t do it in either until you know what’s on the minds of that target audience by talking with them.

Forget the IPO. Do Groupon's ROI calculations even make sense for most retailers?

Will Groupon survive?

My answer is found in the immortal words of Kip from Napoleon Dynamite, “Like anyone can even know that.”

Questions are being raised about Groupon‘s management decisions, accounting practices, burn rate, even its overall financial viability.

But let’s stay at the merchant level right now. Do the ROI calculations even make sense?

I’m not here to say Groupon will fail. If you’re opening the doors to a new restaurant or other retail establishment, it may be smart to benefit from the marketing exposure Groupon will give you. You may not even have to pray for low redemption rates. It’s all new business when you’re new.

But if you’re established, can or should you count on Groupon’s ROI numbers shared at the NRA show? While walking you through their ROI calculation, they project that 5% of those who redeem will return, and then, if those 5% return once per month for the next year, and spend just slightly more than your original deal, you’ve got a 3:1 return. (And, hey, what if they bring friends?!)

A restaurant marketing panel member said during one of the sessions I attended at the recent National Restaurant Association show in Chicago that her aim was to get more regular customers who pay full price.

Will that ever happen if you’re relying on Groupon as your acquisition marketing partner?

Five percent is not a big percentage. Especially if they were all drawn to your location in the first place by a massive discount. And counting on them spending “slightly more” than the original deal was for is a reach, isn’t it?

And heck, returning once per month for the next year? What’s that metric based on? And can you even predict that? These are deal-seeking-and-redeeming consumers we’re talking about here. And what about the possibility that those seeing your deal are just too far away? A recent deal for my Groupon area (dubbed the Inland Empire in southern California), was 73.6 miles away. I’m not driving 73.6 miles to pay just $10 for $20 worth of pizza. And…and…and…and…

Groupon has work to do. There’s a super smart CPA who did some good thinking on this well before the question marks starting popping up about Groupon. Check his stuff out.

The point here is that retailers (most notably restaurants) have to really do their homework to make certain a “daily deal” is the right thing for their business.

Don’t end up like Posie’s Bakery & Cafe. And don’t be too quick to sign up for the Rex Kwon Do $300 eight-week program.

UPDATE:

A few related articles that don’t paint the best picture. But it sounds like some folks are worrying less about Groupon as an instant revenue-generator…instead seeing it as a advertising vehicle to get their company’s name out into the marketplace.

• Painfully low retention rates of BOTH buyers and merchants. via David Heinemeyer Hanson.
• Will Groupon make customers more fickle?
• Who gets the real deal with Groupon? (video)

UPDATE 2:

• That Posie’s Bakery & Cafe story I linked to above? It has hit TechCrunch…with video. It’s not a happy story.

Doug Clark, College Prep English teacher at Olathe North High School in the fall of 1987, burst into our classroom on the first day of my senior year and enthusiastically uttered those words, along with the rest of William Wordsworth’s poem.

“So was it when my life began, so is it now I am a man.”

We were all mesmerized as he made several of us, who did not previously care for poetry prior to that day, care about poetry. His captivating style made it immediately desirable to memorize a poem we had just heard for the first time ever. Countless more poems and sonnets would be permanently etched in our memories before May came.

Mr. Clark was a linchpin, to use Seth Godin’s term (PDF). His brand — how he left us thinking about the class experience and the material we learned from him — was unlike any other teacher’s at that school.

Others might have felt standard operating procedure called for welcoming the class, taking roll, and sharing the syllabus before maybe cracking open the textbook we’d be using, giving a little background on the poet, introducing the era in which this poem was written, then finally dissecting the lines on the page. Mr. Clark went in the exact opposite direction.

He dove in head-first, reciting those words with a zeal that grabbed our attention. It was a brilliant way to seize momentum within seconds of the new class beginning. It was totally unexpected, but totally respected — even admired.

“So be it when I shall grow old or let me die.”

I’m not a teacher. But I often think about how Mr. Clark took charge of that class in an inspiring way and what I can learn from that. He made our class instantly care about new material we may not have been otherwise quick to care about. He did this by presenting it in a non-traditional, engaging, human way.

“The child is the father of the man.”

I also think about how any of us in our chosen professions could do the same, if only we cared a little more.

We could create some pretty outstanding customer experiences if we thought enough to. We could re-position entire companies, re-energize employees, sell our products and services in a whole new way, break down departmental silos, unwind longstanding and unnecessary policies. Any number of things.

Do you get in the way sometimes, or even often? If so, will you stop?

It could make all the difference.

“And I could wish my days to be bound each to each by natural piety.”

1. Don’t hard-sell me on your product before you’ve even qualified whether I’m a potential customer of it.
2. Talk with me like a real person, not a deal to be closed. It’s you and me, right here, right now, face to face.
3. Be at your booth.
4. Don’t sit down at your booth.
5. Add value to my day, not just a promotional product with your logo.
6. Don’t badmouth your competition. Especially if they’re about 20 feet away and on the same aisle. Not classy.
7. Don’t try to educate me about social media if you’re not using it yourself.
8. If you ARE using social media, be social and be real-time.
9. If you ARE using social media, don’t merely beg people to stop by, using the #NRAshow hashtag.
10. Don’t ask to scan my badge before we’ve had a real dialogue.
11. Know your business inside and out. This may be your one chance to build real credibility with me.
12. Stand out from others. You don’t have to have a microphone and PA system, but find a way to differentiate.
13. Why not do a raffle for a free group dinner for winning attendees? Foster connections and conversations.
14. Be your brand.

It’s been super seeing the diversity of exhibitors at this year’s show. From food, to food prep equipment, to the categories I’ve been most drawn to: marketing and POS solutions, many are doing some clever or smart and engaging things to attract attendees.

But it will be great to see exhibitors push themselves to differentiate and offer attendees, who labor over past hundreds of booths, an even better experience next year.

Fellow attendees, do you have any other suggestions?

I won’t be “covering” the show like some kind of web journalist for anyone. I won’t be “livestreaming” it. I won’t push real-time, Ryan Seacrest-style updates.

I don’t have those skills, so much.

But I’ll be there. With the requisite iPhone apps and related accounts setup to pull this off. Ready to whip out said iPhone if I spot a clever brand or product or service, or better yet a smart and creative person I think justifies a little conversation time and some publicity.

That’s the plan. We’ll see how this actually plays out…never thought to approach a show in quite this way before to get the word out.

If you want to follow along, here are your links:

Twitter
Cinch (Audio)
Vimeo (Video)

I’ve got several sessions on my agenda along with plenty of good old fashioned floor-walking with my VP of Marketing Michele Hincks. should be a good time. Follow along and participate if you like.