My wife and I chuckle most evenings when we open the daily post, looking for the most ridiculous marketing material to arrive through the letterbox that day. And, boy, some of the biggest companies in UK PLC are making howlers.
One of my recent favourites must be the new high-quality, glossy mailer that BT are sending out ‘inviting’ people to join Infinity. This beautiful envelope arrives with a very posh looking invitation to join the precious, chosen few to have high-speed broadband over a telephone line. I currently have broadband over fibre-optic cable and am not a BT customer, so I already benefit from speeds far in excess of their normal service. But that’s another story….
The invitation, personalised with my details, hand delivered to my letterbox, at my house on my street seduces me with its elegancy to join this Infinity broadband. However, being one to dig into the detail, I notice some small print on the invitation. This isn’t an invitation to join Infinity. No, it’s an invitation for me to check whether I can join Infinity. And to check whether I can join Infinity, I have to enter my postal address on the BT website. Then they’ll tell me.
So, hang on a minute, BT have my name and address. They’ve delivered me an invitation. And an address is all the information I need to supply back to them for them to work out whether I can receive Infinity. So despite having all the criteria needed to tell me if I can receive their new service (because the information is there when I punch my address details into their website) and marketing to me on the basis that I qualify to be a customer, they’ve decided not to use this information and to waste my time getting me to check. Plus, they’ve designed their invitation to make me believe that I was indeed being invited to join a sexy, high-speed broadband revolution, rather than the must less attractive message that “you might be able to join, but check it yourself”. My time has been wasted and I feel slightly deceived.
If you know that someone’s eligible to receive a service you offer, wouldn’t it be more powerful to use that information to target your communication, rather than to waste the recipient’s time by forcing them to check themselves? Would you deliberately send a targeted, personalised, direct-mail piece to a prospect outside your delivery area offering free delivery, then doubling-back on yourself and asking them to just check if they’re entitled to it?
When you gather information through your processes and in your systems, make sure that you use it properly. Data that’s not being put to good use just isn’t worth having. Indeed, when your prospective customer knows that you have the data and that you’re not putting it to good use, the impact isn’t neutral. It’s negative.
When large corporates make howlers with their marketing, a bright light is shone on the mistakes they make. In many respects this is good. Not least that it makes smaller businesses feel more confident about marketing themselves because they see that people do make mistakes. And mistakes are good. Other people’s mistakes are better. But we should learn from both.
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Have you received direct mail where the prospective supplier hasn’t been as smart as they should have? What’s the best and worst piece of direct mail you’ve ever received? Be great to hear from you.
