Lately I have signed up for a few new email lists and even made some online purchases from companies I have not dealt with before. What never ceases to amaze me is how many of these companies (almost all in this case) drop the ball when it comes to their confirmation email.
I am surprised at how many of these confirmation messages arrive in my inbox – some right away (great) and some many hours, or days, later (bad) – and are just form text messages that everyone else gets.
*Wake up marketers, you are missing the boat!* There’s a potential gold mine waiting to be uncovered here.
When you have captured someone’s interest enough that they have taken the time to sign up for your communications or, better still, bought from you, reward them. Delight them. Exceed their expectations.
How?
Month: May 2006
When “Ken”:http://www.onedegree.ca/category/ken-schafer sent a “request for Mother’s Day postings to One Degree”:http://www.onedegree.ca/2006/05/08/its-mom-week-at-one-degree, it made me scratch my head. I wondered what relevance my Mother had in terms of online marketing? And then it struck me: everything.
I have three brothers (I know, poor Mrs. Joel). We grew up in a middle-class family, which meant that we had everything we wanted but we shared a lot. Instead of individual gifts, my mother would always pool the resources together and get us something we could use together. Stuff like “Pong”:http://www.pong-story.com/, “Atari 2600”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_2600, “Atari 800”:http://oldcomputers.net/atari800.html, “Intellivision”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellivision and one of the first PCs.
From a technology standpoint, we were always ahead of the curve. I remember typing book reports on my Atari 800 and printing them up on a “dot matrix printer”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-matrix_printer while the other kids were still grappling in handwritten assignments.
I also remember the tag-team effort my brothers and I would put into programming a game with the code we got from “Compute Magazine”:http://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/.
I also remember how my Mother never balked when it was time to upgrade from an 800 to a “1200 baud modem”:http://www.cyberroach.com/analog/an19/hayes_1200.htm, or when I wanted Internet service, but the only ISP was out of the province, so I had to pay long distance fees on top of my Internet service. I had a four-digit ICQ number.
And that’s the point, isn’t it?
Earlier today this year’s Webby Award winners were announced. This years winners include a lot of old favourites but it is still worth taking some time to check out the winners and nominees if you are looking for design “inspiration”…
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