Are You a Marketing Pest?

Are you marketing to your customers? You should be; they're typically one of your best sources of new sales. Upselling, cross-selling - for most businesses, these are key parts of a marketing plan.

But how are you doing it? Specifically, are you being a marketing pest?

eFax is. I'm a customer, and I can tell you from firsthand experience that their marketing approach not only isn't making me buy more from them, it's left me convinced that I will cancel their service as soon as I have to reprint my business cards and it's a good time to change fax numbers. They're an excellent example of a company that does a great job delivering a useful service to customers, then turns them off by becoming a complete pest.

When you sign up for eFax's premium service - which gives you a fax number in your choice of area codes, so no one need know that's it's not a real phone number - you start receiving all kinds of marketing messages from eFax. You get them via email, of course; eFax is one of the many companies with no respect for its customers communications preferences There's no way to opt out of the marketing communications. You also get them on your eFax number, which is even more insidious; it's not too hard to look at a subject line, recognize that it's a marketing message, and train your junk mail filters to get rid of it. The fax communications come in as email messages with a cryptic subject line, so you generally must open them to make sure they're not a real fax. Thus, eFax forces you to waste time on their advertising messages whether you like it or not.

All this, while you pay them $13 per month.

I logged into the eFax account and vainly tried to find a place where I could change my communications preferences. No luck; eFax apparently does not care what your preferences are, you silly paying customer! I tried contacting customer support. I received a message back telling me what to do if I received a junk fax. I replied back explaining that the junk faxes were coming from eFax themselves. No reply; customer service just dropped the issue and ignored me. I tried contacting the sales email address on the eFax web site, and was told to contact customer support.

So I gave up. I delete the crap as it comes in, and at some point will cancel my eFax service - which, by the way, works wonderfully.

What could eFax do? The first and most basic problem is that they don't bother to let customers tell them how they want to be contacted. That's simply inexcusable for any company doing business online. Period. There are few things I am very dogmatic about, but this is one: whoever made that call at eFax really should be fired, because the lack of experience and common sense displayed by that decision is frightening.

Second, eFax could have some way for customers to give them feedback: complaints, kudos, suggestions, whatever. They're got one of those pernicious customer-proof web sites that is designed to inhibit any communication from customers that doesn't fall into very clear buckets. There's an email address for "Feedback" that warns you that no one is paying attention to what you're sending.

What does this tell us about eFax? They probably don't have a clear idea of what their customer like, don't like, and want. How they expect to keep meeting customers' needs without talking to customers is unclear, and means that I would be surprised if they exist 10 years from now.

I suspect that eFax is counting on the stickiness of fax services: once you've published a fax number, switching is a pain. That's the only reason I didn't cancel the service after two weeks of getting junk messages. In the short term, they're right; people won't leave easily. They also won't recommend the service to others, and they'll take the first opportunity to leave.

Take a look at your customer marketing. Is it working? How do your customers feel about it? Have you asked them? If you don't know what they think of it, it's time to ask - before you pull an eFax and start driving them away.

A Spy By Any Other Name

Did you catch this article from the Washington Post earlier this week? Spyware Goes Legit? asks the headline... and the answer is no.

Reading the article one gets a disturbing sense of major advertisers looking for a kind of plausible deniability with regard to the possibly illegal, likely damaging to consumers, and certainly intrusive and irritating tactics used by their vendors.

I'm sure that some of the marketing managers quoted in the article had no idea this was going on, but shame on them. The potential brand damage from being associated with adware is too great to not be on top of this. Plus, using adware is just the wrong thing to do, and damages the overall advertising environment for everyone, as consumers decide that they're not going to click on ads, they're going to arm themselves with software to block ads, and delete every cookie on their PC.

Interestingly, I got a very slick piece of spam, total and utter spam, from Mercedes shortly after reading this article. There seems to be more problems in their online marketing house than they know - or will admit.

Bad Copywriter! No Cookie!

Yesterday I got a letter from my insurance agent. Well, I got a letter from their national office (the postmark was not here in Houston) but it was pretty well put together, with his name and a scanned signature. It was a clear, short letter informing me of the upcoming date of my policy renewal, and inviting me to call him with question in case I need to change my coverage. It was a helpful, good letter.

Except.

After this nice letter, written in a good personal tone, there was a PS (standard DM copy technique, of course) reminding me of his direct line. But it ended with this:

"Life changes. Your insurance should keep up. That's our stand."

That's your stand? You mean, like taking a stand on a controversial issue (like insurance should be useful)? With nine words, the copywriter blew the personal tone of the letter and made is sound like stupid corporate-speak. Wham! Instead of a helpful letter from my insurance agent, the piece was transformed into a dumb direct mailer.

If you are going to write something in a personal tone, stick with the personal tone. Don't turn it into something else just to get your current tagline or some kind of branding message in there. I like getting mail from a business that tells me something useful. I don't like getting ads from someone I'm already doing business with that offer me nothing new. Opportunity blown. Allstate, consider different copywriters (I'm available!).