Groupon Employee Spotlight:
Mark Joyner

This month, we’re spotlighting Mark Joyner, a leader who’s been shaping Groupon’s merchant experience for 14 years—and was recently promoted in recognition of the real impact he makes. From streamlining merchant onboarding to improving retention, Mark ensures our efforts focus on the right cities, categories, and deal types, helping merchants succeed and our marketplace grow.

Known for rolling up his sleeves and solving complex challenges, he guides his teams and drives results, especially during peak season when leadership makes all the difference. Outside of work, Mark explores music, travel, and art history, bringing the same curiosity and creativity to life as he does to his work. In this conversation, he shares his journey, his approach to leadership, and how he’s helping both merchants and teams thrive at Groupon.

As his manager, Robert Taracido Ruiz puts it, "Mark has made a real impact this year, from leading onboarding for new North America merchants to driving refunds recuperation projects in Q2 and Q3 that cut refund rates by 170 bps in Q2 alone versus the same period in 2024. He also built the Merchant Growth team as a center of excellence for top clients across all regions and even covered for Chicago DSMs during the summer. And yes, he can sell too! The only minus is his unwavering love for Arsenal. Still with Mark, whether he likes it or not, you’ll never walk alone."

Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your journey at Groupon? 

I attended Tulane University in New Orleans, where I majored in History and Art History. After several years of working within the arts community in New Orleans, I decided to move back home. I had a friend working at Groupon at the time, and he encouraged me to apply. I started as a Merchant Manager, a precursor to the Account Manager position. 

I worked with merchants in New York City and helped scale Groupon from being one deal a day to the global marketplace it is today. I transitioned to a leadership role in 2015 as a DSM in Merchant Support and helped transition them to a service-to-sale organization. Following that, I took over our Senior Account Manager team and helped transition them to the Merchant Success team. Currently, I lead multiple teams within our Merchant Growth team. 

You’ve been with the company for 14 years—what’s kept you motivated and passionate all this time?

The stock answer is the people, and that is definitely part of it! When I initially joined Groupon, I was (and continue to be!) very passionate about helping our local merchants grow. I lived in New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina, and I saw how local merchants were the lifeblood of the city as big box companies pulled out following the storm. 

Helping merchants take that next step of running a Groupon campaign and attempting to grow their business is something I’ve always been passionate about. Since I’ve transitioned to a leadership role, my passion is helping people grow their careers. I love working with individuals who are figuring out what they are skilled at and how they want to grow, and helping them get there. I love the daily challenge of solving complex problems. And again, the people are the best. I have made lifelong friends here, and I truly can’t imagine a place I’d rather work.

How did you come to focus on retention for NAM merchants, particularly Premier, A, and B clients? What attracted you to this area, and what do you enjoy most about helping these merchants succeed?

Groupon is a great place where you can chart your own course to a certain extent. Focusing on our merchants in a support role allowed us the opportunity to focus on things that might get glossed over at first glance. I had a manager at the time who suggested I look into refunds, and I created the structure that the team has adopted over the past 3 years. 

We were leaving money on the table by not fixing minor things that our customers were actively telling us about. We had the information, but we didn’t have a team that was able take that information and bring it back to sales/the merchant to address common concerns. Again, I think what I enjoy about this work is the problem-solving that we get to do. We find the problem, and then we get to be creative about how we want to resolve it. My enjoyment is seeing merchants who are consistent high refunders drop from our weekly reporting due to the efforts that we made to fix their campaigns. 

You were recently promoted—can you explain what your new role involves and what excites you most about it? How does it change the way you contribute to the team and support merchants?

Yes! I am very excited about the new role. I will be managing across teams with my current local team,  who will be getting a new manager who will report to me, working with the Enterprise teams in both North America and Valencia, Spain, with their leaders, and bringing everyone under one roof. My day-to-day will be slightly different, but getting to support our Merchant Growth teams will remain, but it will be more top-down support. The idea is that we can work more efficiently if we are working together, versus everyone having their own little fiefdoms. 

Long term, this will create a much better merchant experience. We talk often about true white glove service, and being able to optimize these teams will allow us to truly bring that white glove service to our merchants. We will be able to get more in-depth with their onboarding as well as maintaining a relationship with our top accounts throughout their merchant journey. We will be able to identify issues before our merchants do, and celebrate their wins in a much more personable way. 

Groupon’s mission is “to be the trusted destination for discovering high‑quality local services & experiences at unbeatable value.” How do you see your work supporting this mission? 

Quite simply, it is helping support our biggest and best merchants so that they want to stay on Groupon indefinitely. When I was explaining Merchant Success/Growth to my wife years ago, my elevator pitch was, and remains, “Our goal is to make it so easy to work with Groupon that our merchants will never want to stop doing so.” 

Peak season is in full swing. How do you help our merchants thrive during this high-pressure period? Can you share a recent example, such as leading refunds recuperation projects or covering for Chicago-based DSMs during the summer, where your actions had a measurable impact?

My team helps during peak by ensuring more of our merchants are on the site faster than before. Through Merchant Success driven onboarding of Ace/King/Queen closes (our best merchants) in Chicago, L.A., New York City, Phoenix, and Las Vegas we found that the team is able to reduce the time it takes to go from close won to live on the site (going from 4.7 days to 3.5 in Q3) as well as the more thorough onboarding experience leading to increased retention of these accounts (75+% were still live at the end of the quarter). 

Due to the fact that the team has a wealth of knowledge and tenure, they can get into the details while onboarding, set proper expectations, and resolve issues more efficiently than other teams. 

This year, you’ve been involved in kickstarting the onboarding project for new merchants in NAM and building the Merchant Growth team as a center of excellence for top clients. How do these projects connect to Groupon’s broader transformation and long-term strategic goals?

If we are getting more merchants on the site faster and setting them up for success through onboarding, we are creating an exceptional merchant experience that will lead to more merchants being on the site for longer periods of time. This means growth for our merchants and for Groupon. 

In a fast-evolving environment, how do you balance daily execution—like ongoing merchant support and peak season priorities—with leading initiatives that drive long-term impact?

Everything is so interconnected. What seems long-term sneaks up on you faster than you think, so it is important to always coach and support your team with those long-term initiatives. They ultimately will play into what you are doing in the short term. Like with being in peak season, long-term we want to bring each operations team under one umbrella to support our merchants.

 That long-term goal still plays into the decisions we are making and the support we are providing to our merchants in the short term. I am a big believer in bringing the team along with me as we go on the ride. I don’t ever want decisions we make to catch them off guard. Therefore, they are aware of what we are attempting to build and why we are asking them as we go through our day-to-day tasks. 

As Groupon shifts toward becoming an AI-native company, how are you leveraging AI in your day-to-day work to support merchants and improve efficiency? Are there any tools or approaches you’ve found particularly useful?

AI isn’t going away, so it is on us to adapt and use it to our benefit. I like to use it for certain more delicate conversations with our merchants as a spot check to make sure the messaging is clear. I’ve also used it heavily in our refunds work. We live and breathe Groupon 40+ hours a week, and what we might think makes perfect sense on a deal page could be very different from what our customers think. 

I use the following prompt after making edits to the deal page to make sure that what we’ve changed makes sense, while also providing top refunding reasons as a spot check to make sure what we are doing works. “I am looking to make this deal easier to understand. Can you review the following text and tell me if there is anything that is unclear or that makes this offer difficult to understand?”. This has proven to be a tremendous help, catching things that made sense with my Groupon brain, but that a customer might not get. Easy prompts like this save me time and allow me to check my blind spot. 

What was your first Groupon experience, and how did it shape your perspective on the company and your role?

Interestingly enough, I had not purchased a Groupon prior to working here! My first Groupon was Big Nicks Burger Joint & Pizza Joint that I bought when I went to New York to visit some friends. I remember how packed the place was. I, of course, waited for the last minute to use the Groupon, so I saw the power of Groupon and how expiration dates could create a massive influx of customers. It excited me to see how many people we were sending to our merchants, and how seamlessly this merchant was redeeming vouchers. 

What’s one lesson—professional or personal—that has most influenced how you tackle challenges and stay resilient at work?

I am a firm believer in the concept of DISC and DISC assessments. It can basically be summed up as we all have different communication styles, and one person’s style may be very different from yours. Whenever I have new team members join my team, I have them take the assessment, then we meet and review their results as well as me sharing mine. I want to make sure that when I am delivering instructions that I am communicating in a way that will resonate with that individual. Not everyone’s communication styles are the same, and it has helped me immensely to know how to effectively communicate with everyone on my team 

Outside of work, what hobbies or activities help you recharge and stay creative, especially during peak season?

My friends and I started a Chicago music podcast (called No Wristbands! We Drink For Free) a couple of years ago. It has been a ton of fun getting to know members of the music community who make Chicago such a unique music scene. Getting to talk about music always fills my cup! 

Finally, what’s one surprising fact about you that most colleagues wouldn’t know from just seeing you at work?

I was an Art History major in college who actually got to use his degree! I majored in Modern and Northern Baroque art, and actually worked in an art gallery in the heart of the French Quarter in New Orleans. I used to tell people I majored in walking backwards carrying paintings, but is still counts!

If someone was visiting the US for the first time, what is the one city, landmark, or experience you would recommend they see first—and why?

I swear this isn’t because they are on Groupon, but I swear by the Chicago Architecture Boat Tours. It is basically a history lesson while sightseeing, while having the ability to have a drink. What could be better? A non-Chicago answer would likely be riding the Streetcar in New Orleans. Again, some beautiful sightseeing, and experiencing the immense geographical and cultural diversity that the U.S. has to offer. 

If you could swap lives with any fictional character for a day, who would you choose and why?

I mean, I’d have to say Ethan Hunt from the Mission Impossible movies! Who wouldn’t want to save the world repeatedly and get to travel all over the world!? It would be a stressful but rewarding day!

What's the most adventurous thing you've ever done, and would you do it again?

I went to China for two weeks without speaking or being able to read Mandarin. My friend and I plotted our own trip - spending a week each in Beijing and Shanghai. The most adventurous part of the trip was a day trip to a water town an hour and a half outside of Shanghai. We found the bus stand, but the Chinese characters didn’t perfectly match what we’d printed out, but we decided to chance it - thinking that if we weren’t where we were supposed to be in an hour and a half, we could double back to where we started. Luckily, we chose correctly, and we made it to the water town. Easily the best trip I’ve ever taken!

If you could host a dinner with any historical figure, who would you invite and what would be the one question you’d want to ask them?

Rembrandt Van Rijn - He’s one of my very favorite painters, and there is so much mystery that surrounds his life. If you ask the right person, he can be described as arrogant, or humble, or brilliant, or shambolic, or generous, or mischievous. A lot of mystery surrounds his creative output as well, with over 2000 paintings at one point being attributed to him. I’d want to ask him what he truly did paint, and what pieces attributed to him aren’t really by him?  

If you could instantly master any skill or talent, what would it be and why?

This one is easy, I’d want to be able to master literally any foreign language! I have attempted to and failed to learn Spanish, French, Dutch, Tibetan, and Mandarin over the years. I thought learning it could be accelerated by how badly I wanted to learn the language, but Mandarin just didn’t stick. I’d love to be able to master any foreign language. I am always envious of my international colleagues who speak multiple!

What's the most embarrassing song on your playlist that you secretly love?

I subscribe to the belief that if you like something, it isn’t a guilty pleasure! However, if we are saying that doesn’t count, it would have to be (Can’t Live Without Your) Love and Affection by Nelson!

And finally, what was the last Groupon you bought?

My last Groupon was a great pizza place in my neighborhood that I hadn’t tried yet - Capriccio Artisan Pizza and Coffee.