At the end of August I surveyed my collection of ties and
lamented my lack of a ‘power tie.’ It’s the end of the year, that time when you
want to bring a little extra oomph to the office. Let your bosses know: review
time is approaching and I look very damn professional. So I placed an order for
four new ties from tiebar.com. It was a decision driven almost entirely by successful
marketing on their part. I did not want to go to the Mall. Dwayne Wade dresses
a hell of a lot better than me and he endorses tiebar.com. He must be confident
enough that his personal brand won’t take a beating with an inferior product so
boom: I purchase.
The ties arrive. They are nice ties. They are nicer than
some ties and not as nice as other ties. There are ties, in the same price
range, that are equally as nice being sold every day by a large variety of
competitors.
Before the ties arrived, I started getting emails from
tiebar.com marketing their ties to me. This is understandable and we are all
used to getting promotional emails by now. I probably forgot to uncheck a box,
it’s no big deal. Then the emails started getting a little more frequent and
they annoyed me. I was receiving an
email from tiebar.com every day, which is just too much tie talk for me.
I came up with an idea, a plan if you will. But before we
get to that, let me sort through something obvious you may have caught on to by
now.
At any point I could select “unsubscribe,” as we have all
done countless times. But that puts the onus on me, the customer. And, besides,
I liked the ties. I wouldn’t mind receiving a seasonal email regarding a sale.
In fact, that would be great. Let me know. Keep me in the loop. Since you are
trying, as a company, to sell me more of your products, why do I need to take
an action to not be bothered by you? Is this the best way to market?
I wrote tiebar.com an email. Here it is:
I received a response right away from Customer Service.
Hello,
Thank you for your email! Your inquiry and feedback has been
passed out to our marketing team.
Please let us know if there is anything else we can do for you!
Ignoring the odd grammatical choice, at this point, I am thinking “Great! I am in! They will pass this along to their marketing team, and someone is going to see this and jump on it.”
It has been ten days now. In that time I have received 10
more promotional emails from tiebar.com, but no response to my deal.
The purpose of marketing, we should all be reminded from
time to time, is to increase revenue for the business. It’s not more
complicated than that and everything else is just tactics and strategy (yes,
there is a difference between tactics and strategy).
Automated marketing is a tactic to free up the precious
resource of time for marketers to do more. What you do with that freed up time
is pretty important. What you do with all of your time is pretty important, we
have one brief trip through this bizarre intergalactic rush.
My deal offered more revenue for tiebar.com, but they didn’t
take it. It’s possible, even likely, that it never reached the right person or
even the right department. That’s understandable, I get it. But it’s terrible marketing.
Avoid the same mistake. Automate some marketing tasks,
absolutely. But when your customer, or client, or prospective customer or
client speaks to you, no matter what the medium (we all know the mediums are
growing every day, communication now entirely surrounds us): listen, and
communicate back. Engage. Help. Be there. Be present. Form a relationship.
Grow the revenue.
