Nick Stuart
Emails. Who has an email address that they use just for online purchases? I do. I hate spam/marketing/sales/“Hey Nick” emails. They clutter my inbox. And also, wasn’t GDPR supposed to stop all this?!
Yes, emails can be useful. Sometimes. The emails that promise that you can make $10,000 a day from your own bed, well, they are different kind of emails.
In theory these are genius. You tell Rightmove and Zoopla what you are looking for and they deliver your perfect home to your inbox.
Except they don’t.
They deliver any property that might, at a stretch, answer one or two of your new home demands. They are click bait. They drive you to to their site, you're disappointed with what you find but now you're there... ...off you go scrolling through listing after listing that you’ve already ruled out.
Sound familiar? Frustrating?
This happens again and again until you create a rule in your inbox that pushes all alerts to your spam folder or, if you’re organised, to a specific property alerts folder. Once you’ve done this, all the value in this great idea has gone. Rightmove and Zoopla alert emails are the boy that cried wolf.
Compare this to the happy email on a Monday from Spotify Discover Weekly. The email that brings you 30 unheard (by you) songs that more often than not you do actually enjoy listening to. They open up a new world of musicians and sounds.
What’s the difference? Spotify has spent a fortune building an incredibly complicated recommendation engine that uses collaboration filters, natural language processing and audio models to bring you tailored/bespoke recommendations (here’s how it works). I love that email in my inbox on a Monday. It brings joy.
For those that didn’t click the link, Spotify analyses what you like, what others who have liked similar things like, analyses the songs themselves, analyses reviews and blogs and collates all this information and then uses it to deliver to you 30 songs not currently in your library. As a listener, I’m not too bothered by all the technology that goes on behind the scenes but also as a listener I love the effort that brings me new songs every Monday.
We've analysed data about locations; schools, access to transport links, reliability of trains, access to parks, how busy a road is and about 15 other variables. We've analysed properties for condition, style, number of potential bedrooms and so much more. Then as a user, you tell us what matters to you (which music you like listening to) and we deliver to you personalised results with our expert opinion layered on top.
