Wednesday, April 4, 2007

"Do A Little Dance..."

My sister has a unique outgoing message on her voicemail system. On it, she says:

"Hi this is Julie. At the tone, please do a dance."

Last night, she was telling me about a unique message that was left on her voicemail system from GoDaddy. Julie has a website that is hosted by GoDaddy and a CSR called her a couple days ago to check in on her to see if she had any questions or concerns with their service. Pretty nice customer service, right? But here's the kicker: the CSR left the best message for Julie. He said:

"Do-do-do-do-do-do....Oh, sorry, I was just dancing. Hi Julie this is [I forget his name] from GoDaddy.com. We just want to check in and see if you have any questions...."

Julie played it for me yesterday. The CSR actually sang to her on the message. Not creepily, but in a fun way. He made a personal connection with Julie. After she played the message for me, I asked her, "From now on, when you have to host a website, where will you go?"

Of course, she replied, "GoDaddy".

Even when I asked her if the cost was twice or three times more expensive than another service, she replied that she would go to GoDaddy. That company has always provided great customer service and this episode shows that the tradition continues.

What a great marketing tool by GoDaddy: great employees. By investing in people with personalities and encouraging them to take their time on a call (as opposed to a company like Sprint who has a company-wide policy of getting each call to hang up before seven minutes), they not only manage to keep their valuable existing customer-base, but also find countless new customers. Think about it: Julie told me about the message, and now you're reading about it on a syndicated blog. I'm sure she told more people about this unique message and provided a personal referral. For free.

Tuesday, April 3, 2007

If at first you don't succeed...

Good Morning. I woke up this morning with an email in my Gmail account. It was the same email that I've received every other day for the past month. It was from Joseph A. Bank's Clothing store, wanting me to check out their new deal or sale or something. Whatever it was, after the first email, I realized that it wasn't something I cared about, so I've just deleted all the other emails as they've arrived.

Here's the kicker: I'm about to buy a suit. Maybe two. Will I buy them from Jos A Bank? No way. Here's why:

1) They continued to bombard me with marketing messages, even after they didn't convert me to a sale with five (or ten) emails.
2) I think it's annoying and spammy to send me as many emails as they possibly can. It's akin to throwing a bunch of stuff against the wall to see what sticks.

So the wonderful marketing folks over at Joseph A Bank has actually helped the company take a step back in my eyes. Where I would've made my first stop at their store to buy my suits, I now will not even consider stopping by.

Here's what I would've done differently:

1) I would've segmented their email list so that the email I received was more relevant to me (they were advertising winter top coats and low-quality, cheap suits). Based on my purchases at their store, they should see that I buy a lot of shirts and sweaters from them -- those are the deals they should've served me.

2) Offer me a way to express additional interest in the email or products without having to pull out my credit card. Whether this is an actual "Select products you're interested in so we can give you some great deals" thing or more of a viral "send this deal along to someone else" (my brother is also purchasing a suit and I would've probably sent this along to him), let me interact with the company without making a purchase. This was an unsolicited email and to expect me to simply pull out the plastic was pretty presumptuous. Joseph A Bank doesn't win the price battle in men's clothing, so they need to develop a relationship with their customers, which occurs when you visit the store in person, but not through these email messages.

Has anyone else received these emails or similarly-annoying messages constantly? Do you think we can get a PR person from Jos A Bank to respond to this post? I wonder if they're monitoring their reputation in the marketplace after this month-long email campaign.