While this is a little rant of mine, it’s an important lesson for those engaged in or thinking about starting direct email campaigns. This is how, with a simple email campaign, you can create a bad customer experience without even knowing it.
False personalization of an mass email is just bad customer experience. If the marketing department inserts a company founder’s signature (or Twitter name in this case) into an email campaign:
- the company founder should involved in the process
- the message should be personal and authentic
- and — at the very least — segment the email so that you are sending different, and appropriate, messages to your customers
Mass emails are OK, people accept and receive them. But to try and make a mass email feel personal by simply inserting the founder or CEOs name… Well, that’s just misleading your customer and it makes you look deceptive. It hurts, rather than helps, your brand.
Case in point. Recently, I’ve become thoroughly addicted to Twitter. I was beginning to feel like a part of the community, a true Twitter insider if you will. But then, I received my first direct email message from the folks at Twitter. There were several things totally wrong with this email (see full email at the bottom of the post)…
1.) I got a “Happy New Year” email on Feb 2nd, which I think is a little too late, but this is minor…
2.) Since I post on Twitter several times a day, this twitter “Come Back” email with its simplistic advice was so thoroughly insulting, Twitter obviously failed to do any email segmentation.
3.) But the icing on the cake is the “personalized” thank yous from the co-founders. Really? If they were at all involved in this email, I would hope they at least would have segmented the campaign by simply removing all active (i.e. people who used Twitter in last two weeks) from the email list. Knowing that they really weren’t involved – this just smacks so false.
Am I going to switch from Twitter because of this? I can’t – Twitter is Twitter. For Right Now. New platforms will evolve and grow. I’m just getting into Tumblr and it’s cool. If the Twitter folks fail to give out real, honest Twitter love, people will start to jump ship.
@Biz, @Ev, & @Jack: I highly recommend posting a giant My Space logo above your desks. It can happen…
BTW: In the Twitterverse I realize that I am a peon, so I DM’ed @bernierjohn, the man behind Best Buy Twelpforce, and he too got the exact same email. Seriously?
The email I got from Twitter…
This has been reposted from my Customer Experience reference site, #CX_Fail. Share your stories of absurd customer experience failures or outstanding customer experience wins at #CX_Fail or #CX_Win.
