Recognising Inbox Insanity
I was checking out the free traffic booster and backlink software called Comment Kahuna today and noticed this message on their opt-in page:
Why must you opt-in? We have several free upgrades planned soon. You will be notified about them via email. We respect your privacy and inbox sanity. You will not be hammered with a million emails or promotions. We promise.
If you’re on multiple mailing lists, and don’t manage your inbox — you very well might find yourself suffering from inbox insanity.
I recently heard an internet marketer explain how they use a different email address for EVERY list they’re on (more than 500). Personally, I don’t have the time or inclination to track my incoming traffic that ruthlessly.
Instead, I use Google mail to manage my lists. Google’s labels and filters do a great job of sorting out the mail, and also filters can be setup to ensure messages never make it into the spam box (when some marketers fail to test if the words they use will trigger spam filters).
I leave it up to Google’s experts to identify and track spam.
And I happily accept Google’s offer of more than 7Gb of free space in exchange for some ads down the right hand side (no, I don’t use a Firefox script to hide the ads — as a marketer and copywriter, I enjoy looking at Google ads to see what gets my attention).
I think the “inbox sanity” message will resonate with a lot of people. They feel overwhelmed at times, especially around product launches or event countdowns where several of the people they get mail from are all promoting the same thing.
I don’t condemn frequent emails — actually it frustrates me to see people with very powerful lists under-utilise its potential. For example, I’m on one huge list (worldwide I would guess the numbers are in the hundreds of thousands or millions) — yet I get email from that source only a few times per year.
But back to the example above.
In this case, I think it’s a great example of keeping your antenna tuned in to the ongoing feelings of the marketplace. It’s just like watching the news or reading all of the regular magazines — if you don’t know what’s going on, you won’t know what your market is thinking!
Aircraft Safety Anomaly
While we were hurtling over New South Wales today at 939 km/hour and 10,721 metres off the ground on our Virgin Blue flight (in Sardine Class) to Coolangatta, I was thinking about the safety demonstration the cabin crew go through at the start of every flight (as you would when your mind wanders during downtime on flights in Sardine Class!
The first thing the cabin crew do is advise that you should pay careful attention to the safety demonstration/presentation, no matter what your flying experience. Then, they advise that each person has a safety card in the seat pocket in front of them and that you should look through it BEFORE take-off.
You are, of course, already taxiing to the runway.
They then continue with the rest of the demonstration — seatbelts, life jackets, exits etc … yet verbally they just told you to stop paying attention and read the safety card before take-off, which is looming rather fast!
How can you possible follow both conflicting instructions? Shouldn’t they ask you to read the safety card AFTER you’ve watched the rest of the demonstration?
As we’re now in the Litigious Age of mankind, isn’t that a potentially costly safety sequence? Someone gets injured, because their seatbelt wasn’t properly fastened, and they sue the airline as the cabin crew told them to read the safety card instead of watching how to correctly fasten the seatbelt … I’m surprised no-one has considered this issue (especially the legal or insurance types who work for the airlines)!
To me, this relates strongly at times to copywriting — saying the right things in the right sequence. Get it out of order, and you can reduce your response.
Done For You Banking
With the amount of “noise” in online marketing there’s not much these days that gets into my inbox for my direct attention. Most incoming mail is heavily filtered into folders: I’ll look at it if and when I think it’s worthwhile. I’m very protective of my inbox and it ensures I remain focused on what matters to me.
One of the emails that I do allow that privilege is the weekly Springwise newsletter of new business ideas: based on what subscribers spot and report from around the world. Along with its sister site, Trend Watching (monthly briefings on emerging consumer trends), it’s great entrepreneurial juice for the brain. Ideas sprout from the Springwise website daily, but I’m happy to take in a weekly digest.
This week again included a great idea for “done for you” style marketing: this time for wealthy clients of a private bank (Insinger de Beaufort in Amsterdam). As it says in the article, the bank realised many of its wealthy clients lacked the time or patience to deal with their personal finances — so it found a simple and convenient way to solve that problem. The bank even takes care of the entire follow-up process, including paying the bills, filing tax returns and processing business expenses!
And here’s another stroke of brilliance about this idea:
Sensing a gap in the market, Insinger de Beaufort offers its shoebox service to clients at other banks, too.
Where can you add “done for you” into your services? A related service? Something else your client normally has to do in the overall process? This should spark a ton of cross-marketing ideas with complementary businesses, to come up with your own “simple” and “easy” examples.
Timezones matter
Picture this … it’s just after 1am right now … the dead of the night here on the weekend … all’s quiet in the neighborhood, everyone is tucked in their warm cozy beds … lights are out … even the cat is curled up dreaming of what he might get to chase and stalk tomorrow.
Ring ring riiiiiiiiing! Off goes the phone at full pitch: a rather startling sound to snap you out of your sleep in the middle of the night. The first thought, of course, is that it’s a family emergency call … who else would call at 1:01am? Maybe someone has had an accident or needs help?
Grabbing the phone, I notice the caller ID says “Unavailable” … which means a call from overseas. Picking it up, I hear a pre-recorded voice broadcast …
“Hi, this is Bill Glazer and I just wanted to …”
Slam!
A voice broadcast … at 1am on a Sunday morning! Are you kidding?
My ONLY response to this kind of call is to slam down the phone and not feel the least bit impressed about the caller or their campaign.
My only guess is that at 1:01am in the middle of the night in Melbourne Australia is the equivalent of some decent hour of the day in the USA for this kind of telemarketing.
But if you have a global mailing/calling list, you could do much better taking into account that a suitable time of day to call is different according to what timezone your customers live in!
(You wouldn’t even have to ask for the info: the country code and area code in the phone number gives you an indication, especially for land line numbers).
This timezone concept also applies to the “launches” now undertaken for many online products that go on sale at a set time.
For example, “12 noon this Friday” for sometime in the eastern United States is a whole lot different for us Aussies. Yet very few campaigns factor in to their communication a way to help their list figure out what the time will be where they live.
It’d be easy enough to include more than one timezone in the pre-launch messages (maybe covering 5 or 6 high profile locations around the world) … or at least setup a link to an online time service so visitors can easily work out what “12 noon on Friday” will mean to them locally.
And if you’re going to use voice broadcasts in your campaign, know enough about your global mailing list to help prevent unwelcome phone calls in the dead of the night!
Standing Out From Competitors
Whilst up in Sydney last week for our Platinum mastermind meeting, it got quite stormy, especially on the Wednesday night. There was plenty of lightning and thunder outside our hotel window at Homebush!
That caused a change in planes on Thursday morning for our trip home to Melbourne (thankfully no cancelled flight) and I noticed a few extra Virgin Blue crew with us as passengers. The staff mentioned it was due to a few cancelled flights because of the storms.
Only one week before, Jetstar cancelled a number of domestic flights out of Sydney due to weather problems and, much to the ire of passengers, simply off-loaded any responsibility to assist affected travellers. Jetstar blamed Sydney Airport, and the airport fired back at Jetstar, in a stoush that became quite public. Whether or not they were responsible, both parties should be ashamed of forgetting the affect their decisions had on passengers, some of whom spent several hours of the night in a bus shelter outside the terminal.
Enter Virgin Blue and the Sir Richard Branson style attitude.
When last Wednesday night’s flights were cancelled because of the storms, Virgin Blue kept open the lines of communication, brought food back off the plane into the terminal and distributed it to passengers, arranged hotel credits up to $200 so passengers could have accommodation, kept back staff to assist in handing out food and even kept open the Sydney domestic terminal (probably easier after the debacle with Jetstar the week before).
As reported in the Daily Tele, Virgin gave Jetstar a lesson in customer service.
On one hand, as the article reports, “Jetstar faces an investigation by Victoria’s consumer affairs lobby, with hundreds of passengers vowing to never fly the airline again.” On top of that, the article quotes:
The Jetstar fiasco, which left politicians and consumer groups outraged, was the biggest publicity nightmare for the low-cost airline since it took to the skies four years ago.
On the other hand, Virgin Blue, recognising a perfect opportunity for some positive PR and to stand out in the low-cost flight market, did the right thing (whether or not responsible) and showed true customer excellence in response to a similar situation.
Despite a change in plane (which affected our already completed web check-in), a rather busy check-in for our bag drop off and a need to get to the airport a bit earlier, all went as well as could be expected on Thursday — it really didn’t affect our travel. The cabin crew kept us rather amused with their quirky announcements (as they are often wont to do) and it reinforced for us why we choose to fly Virgin Blue. We got an early call on the mobile a couple of hours before departure to inform us of a change in the plane and we were advised to get to the airport a bit early, which we did.
I’ve had an overnight cancellation before (with Qantas/Air Pacific to Fiji) and was given cab charge vouchers and offered an accommodation credit, so I know that other airlines do make an effort to look after passengers when they cancel a service.
In Jetstar’s case, it really is lost opportunity — forgetting the lifetime value of their customers and taking the self-focused, profit-centric view that left passengers — and the public — with a very bitter aftertaste. It risks losing bookings both from affected passengers and other travellers who have seen the fiasco play out in public. That will probably have a much bigger impact on their bottom line than doing the right thing by the passengers on the night.