Brands

Showcasing the Next Hot Marketing Apps

Four tech innovators presented their latest products at Daily Deal Summit East’s annual Tech Showcase last month. Here’s a rundown of the products that could change marketing.

Streamline

Jeff Kupietzky, CEO of Active Path, a self-described bringer of “pizzazz” to the email experience, began his April 18 presentation with stats: The average consumer receives more than 100 emails a day, accounting for about 2.5 hours of their day.

Email hasn’t changed in the last 15 years and marketers are focused on getting emails into inboxes, he said. As a result, the volume of delivered emails has increased 60 percent over the last 15 years, while response rate has dropped to 15 percent.

Active Path’s solution is ActiveMail, a system that can create a secure, interactive email experience. For example, recipients can retweet within Gmail, or browse Nordstrom’s sale options within their inbox when they get a deal offer. In the publication realm, this means moving away from the stagnant newsletter format. Instead, imagine distributing one beautiful rotator of intriguing quotes that a recipient can click on to expand into full articles. That’s smarter email content.

Localize

Perry Evans, founder and CEO of Closely, presented its new app, Perch. Perch is “a bird’s eye view of your business neighborhood,” he said, providing small businesses with competition awareness, neighboring business statuses, and consumer crowd activity metrics.

According to Evans, Closely aims to “deliver a lens through which merchants can watch and learn.” Will this be a highlight for businesses, giving them the power of awareness and then potential connection? Will that power translate to new revenue streams? Small businesses can request an invitation to the beta version at closely.com/perch.

Connect

Jay Shek presented Centzy, a comparison-shopping engine for local services. “It’s like Kayak,” he said, but for all the buying opportunities in a consumer’s vicinity. Centzy users search for a service they want and are then given local results based on price, quality, and value (a combination of the former two factors).

Less than 25 percent of local businesses post their prices online, so it’s impossible to get complete price-comparison results on Google or Yelp. “[Centzy provides] comprehensive data that’s never been aggregated to this depth before,” Shek said.

Centzy collects data via paid crowdsourcing. They pay people to call businesses one by one to get the necessary information. It’s a great example of connecting a hungry work force (much like Contently does) to businesses, who can then connect to consumers. Centzy enables people to get what they want efficiently by connecting previously fragmented dots. Sound familiar? Most quality content services follow a similar formula.

Consolidate

CEO & co-founder of Bitehunter Gil Harel gave a demo of “BiteHunter 2.0,” an app that combines restaurant discovery with promotional deals. Thirty percent of local searches are related to dining, and Bitehunter wanted to give people their food and more.

“We want to give you all the information we can give you in order to make a smart dining decision,” Harel said. When users decide on a restaurant deal, they can purchase it in-app and then present it to their waiter via mobile email to get the discount.

Each of these apps promises to connect users to what they crave, wherever the happen to be, for less than they expected to pay. Combine these technologies with engaging content, and a vision of the optimized, streamlined future begins to emerge.

Image courtesy of Pavel Ignatov/shutterstock

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