The brand that never says hurry, and is always on sale

This is the first Inbox Index, Siftbox’s quarterly ranking of how brands treat the inbox they were invited into. Fifty-one Canadian retail newsletters, scored from email our panel inboxes actually received, on three dimensions: how much they send, how often they tell you to hurry, and whether the regular price is real.

The result worth sitting with is PUMA.

Across 132 emails in the quarter, PUMA never once put a deadline in a subject line. No “ends tonight”, no “final hours”, not one, and none in the offers we read inside the emails either. On honesty about urgency, full marks.

PUMA also mailed each subscriber six times a week, and on 83% of the days we observed, a discount was live. A brand on sale four days in five does not have a sale, it has a price.

A single number would have to average those two facts into mush. This is why the Siftbox Score is built from separate dimensions: PUMA scores 5 out of 12, with the full story visible in the row, scrupulously honest, busy, and permanently discounted.

It also answers the objection an index like this invites. We sell a solution to the problem the index measures, and we say so at the top of the methodology. A rubric built to convict would not have handed PUMA full marks for honesty, and it would not have put eight brands in the top band, Zara among them for doing nothing louder than selling things at their price, 1.8 emails a week, zero deadline claims, zero discounted days.

See the Retail Edition, numbers and all. It covers the complete quarter, 1 July to 30 September.

An earlier version of this post, written on provisional figures, led with Gap. Over the full quarter Gap put a deadline in six subject lines, so it no longer fits the description, and PUMA does.