My phantom waiting room, bamboozled customers, and DirecTV

September 28, 2009 By

Another item from the junk-mail files.

It’s amusing to observe how off-base some of this old-school dead-tree marketing can be.

I usually throw this stuff away without opening it, but what the heck, it was a slow mail day, plus this one was addressed to my business name, which was slightly unusual.

It was addressed to me as “manager” (that’s strike one, I’m the owner of this business, thankyouverymuch).

Across the top of the first page: “Give your business a boost with DirecTV.”

A boost? How nice. I can’t imagine how, though, so I read the first paragraph:

Dear Wendy Cholbi,

Running a business can be very rewarding–and also demanding, hectic and exhausting. DirecTV can help.

DirecTV can reduce the demands on my business? Give me more sleep? How exactly are they planning to help? I continued reading:

With the best variety of sports, shows and up-to-the-minute news, DirecTV will keep your customers entertained and your employees informed.

Oh, I’m starting to get it. They think I have a business with a waiting room and people in it. Nope, entirely virtual, no waiting room needed. And that bit about keeping my employees informed strikes an odd note. Not just because I have no employees, but because…television? Keeping people informed? Really?

And the paragraph continued (this is the part that inspired me to start dissecting the letter):

You’ll make wait times feel shorter, liven up your atmosphere and attract more customers.

So rather than, oh, I don’t know, actually serving my customers faster (again, assuming they were here in person, which they’re not), I’m supposed to trick them into thinking they didn’t wait as long…by forcing them to watch TV.

So many things wrong with that set of assumptions. Where to start?

I’ll just say that as a Highly Sensitive Person, I hate waiting rooms with a TV. This includes airports, by the way. Hate. Sometimes I have to plug my ears to stay sane.

DirecTV actually tells me that they’re “an affordable way to grow my business.” That seems like a big leap.

It’s one thing to trick the hypothetical customers doomed to wait in my nonexistent waiting room with forced entertainment. It’s another to assume that any of those customers chose my waiting room because other waiting rooms weren’t equipped with DirecTV.

Attract more customers? Really? I’ve never heard anyone say “Well, I chose my son’s pediatrician because they have a TV in the waiting room.”

I’ll give DirecTV a nod for creative logic and the chutzpah to blindly send this message to every business on the state rolls. I imagine that a direct-mail campaign like this costs more than they’ll get, but what do I know? I deal with instant, measurable online information. And sorry, but I don’t plan to ever have a waiting room.

Filed Under: Real-Life Marketing Tagged With:

I’m a second-class citizen with Verizon

September 21, 2009 By

I’m really annoyed by a piece of junk mail I just got from Verizon.

Apparently, they’re pushing the fiber-optic TV/internet/phone bundle for $79.99 per month. Nice deal, right?

Except that I already have that bundle, and I’m paying $99.99 per month.

I like Verizon. I’ve had a bundled landline/internet/cellphone service from them for years. Never had any serious reason to consider switching. You might even call me a loyal customer.

And this is the thanks I get? To find out that others out there, who aren’t even customers yet, are being offered a better deal than I got, when I’ve been paying Verizon for years?

Last year when I switched to their TV service, it was kind of a big deal because I’d been a happy DirecTV customer for something like 10 years. But when I learned that the Series3 TiVo (which would give me all kinds of features not available on my Series2 DirecTiVo) was compatible with the fiber-optic TV package, I was sold.

And I’ve been very happy with the fiber-optic service. We get more channels than we used to with DirecTV, no problems with weather (high winds and thunderstorms used to seriously futz with the DTV signal), and the internet and phone have worked smoothly.

(attention, gods of Internet Irony: Please do not destroy my broadband connection just because I wrote a post that said it was working. I can offer you a sacrifice of a very nice blueberry muffin.)

It’s a bit of a slap in the face to find out that Verizon is making this better-priced offer available to new customers (yes, there’s fine print to that effect, current customers are not eligible).

It’s also annoying to think that they have a giant database of customers, and yet somehow I’m still receiving junk mail intended for non-customers.

I guess that the potential customer annoyance from people like yours truly is not worth the time and expense it would take to clean up their database so that people who are already loyal customers don’t get these solicitations.

Time to check my own AWeber lists to make sure I’m not doing the same thing to my peeps!

Filed Under: Real-Life Marketing Tagged With:

Marketing meditations on a pizza box

August 30, 2009 By

I picked up two pizzas from Papa John’s yesterday. The take-out $5.99 specials. There were a couple of random things I noticed on the box:

Coupons: A problem and a question

The coupons stuck to the top included the usual fare (two large pizzas for $18.99, family dinner special for $20.99, etc.) but on the same sheet, there was a big coupon for 25% off Amtrak fares (with a huge paragraph of limitations and exclusions).

First, don’t get me started on limitations and exclusions. If you’re going to give me a coupon, don’t make me read an encyclopedia entry on the tortured gymnastics I’m going to have to go through to redeem it. Make it simple. Coupons with wall-of-text fine print say “please recycle me.”

Second, I’d love to know the reasoning behind sticking an Amtrak coupon on a pizza box. Do Papa John’s pizza buyers somehow overlap the demographics of desired Amtrak customers? Is there something about pizza that makes pizza-eaters more likely to travel by train? Or is it a wildly flailing, desperate attempt to somehow get anyone to ride Amtrak?

I feel smart, but somehow also manipulated

There was a little receipt sticker on the top pizza box, showing that my subtotal was $27.48 (that’s what I would have paid if I’d called in the order for delivery, I suppose) and that I got a discount of $15.50 for picking up the take-out specials.

Yay me! I paid only $11.98 (plus tax!) for something some other sucker might have paid $27.48 for! Awesome!

And now I will never again call in an order in advance. Because I will never knowingly pay that extra $15.50. Does that make me a savvy consumer… or a mindless drone who’s happy to obey a corporate giant’s instructions? I’m not sure.

Thanks to Reese for my pizza experience

Also on the receipt was a line that read “Your pizza experience managed by Reese.” Really? Because Reese wasn’t invited to my house for dinner. So how much actual managing of my pizza experience could this guy really do?

Yeah, I know. What they really mean is that Reese was the guy behind the cash register when I showed up to buy my specials. But “pizza experience?” It’s kinda clever, really. Makes it seem like I didn’t just grab a takeout dinner, I had a pizza experience. And it’s all thanks to my buddy Reese.

Filed Under: Real-Life Marketing Tagged With: , , ,

What’s an email list and do you need one?

August 25, 2009 By

Last week I talked about some uses of autoresponders in managing your email. This week I want to talk about the idea of an email list.

Email lists: The conventional wisdom

If you’ve read anything about Internet marketing, you’ve probably heard the prevailing view, which is that you must have an email list. Apparently, you’re supposed to start collecting names as soon and as aggressively as possible — before you even have a product, before you even have a website, before you even know where your business is going.

You’re supposed to “capture” (yep, that’s a technical term) as many email addresses as possible, as quickly as possible. Then you’ll have a group of people who have given you permission to send them email. So as soon as you have a product, you can serve up a tantalizing advertisement to your captive audience. A small percentage of them will click through, a smaller percentage will actually buy the thing you’re advertising, and you’re in business.

This is what’s called a sales funnel. You start with the wide end (everyone on the Internet), and narrow it down to smaller and smaller numbers, until the few who drip through the bottom are actually bringing you money.

Why the conventional wisdom is exactly backward

The sales funnel is old-school marketing. It worked in old-school circumstances. I believe it’s time to not only treat people differently, but act differently as businesses.

Seth Godin wrote a free ebook called Flipping the Funnel three years ago in which he talked about the power of the Web and social media in marketing. I agree with much of what he said then, but what follows is purely my own take on the whole sales funnel metaphor.

Here are three reasons the conventional “sales funnel” wisdom fails to understand the real world, including the transformational online businesses we’re trying to build:

  • It’s mechanical. Each prospect at a given level is treated as an interchangeable cog. The whole process is viewed as a machine, which will produce the proper amount of a desired output (money) if you feed it the right number of cog-prospects and program it correctly. But the people you want to work with are individuals, not cogs. And your business is alive and growing, not a piece of machinery.
  • It’s violent. You’re supposed to “capture” these email addresses, then “target” people with messages that will “convert” them into cash for you. Ouch, I say! Do you want your Right People to feel hounded and hunted, or do you want them to feel like they’re getting the greatest gift in the world just by working with you?
  • It’s scarcity-based. This zero-sum system treats money as a precious, limited resource, and assumes that all your sophisticated marketing machinery is just a way to extract it from your customers. No matter if they’re empty husks afterward — you’ve got their money, so you win. What if, instead, you treated money as a renewable resource (to borrow an environmental term) and cultivated your customers into a sustainable ecosystem instead of a one-way trip through a funnel?

So what’s this got to do with email lists?

OK, back to the email list question. I love and use email lists; they are essential to my businesses. I believe you can collect email addresses with integrity and that both parties can (and should) benefit.

If I didn’t believe this, I wouldn’t be OK with asking people to subscribe to the blog. And I wouldn’t happily recommend email list provider AWeber and offer AWeber consulting services.

But an email list is just one tool, just one small branch of my small-business tree. It only makes sense to have it (and cultivate it by sending regular messages) if I’ve got a trunk to support it, and roots to nourish it.

That’s why the advice to start gathering names first seems backward to me. I believe that building a list is an activity that grows naturally out of providing a valuable product or service (just as branches grow naturally from a tree trunk).

What are you saying? is a much more important question than how many people are on your list?

With the wide availability of RSS, and the proliferation of blogs, an email list is no longer a one-size-fits-all must-have marketing tool.

Instead, an email list is only a good idea if:

  1. You have something to say
  2. You have some idea of who your Right People are
  3. Email is the best way for your Right People to receive this information
  4. Email is the best way for you to provide the information to your Right People
  5. You’re ready and able to invest upwards of $120 per year to manage your list professionally (that is, protect yourself from being labeled a spammer)

What do you think? I’d love to read your reactions. I know this is a big topic (and apparently I’m totally incapable of being brief!), and worth discussing further. So leave a comment and let’s talk!

Until next week,
Wendy Cholbi, your friendly neighborhood swim-goggle-wearing technology-to-English translator

Did you like this post? You can subscribe to get blog updates in your inbox or RSS reader!

Filed Under: Heart-Centered Tech Tips Tagged With: , , , , ,
« Older Posts
Newer Posts »