This is one of the worst marketing emails I’ve seen in a while:

Priceline.com wants me to fill out a survey for a recent car rental I made through their site. Simple and innocent enough at first glance.

What really bothers me with this email is their reason why I should fill out the survey.

Usually, I hesitate to fill out any survey unless I have had a bad experience. If I’ve had a positive or neutral experience, I usually ignore these unless there is some offer, reward, or benefit for me (i.e. improved customer service in the future).

Priceline.com, on the other hand, says I’ll get “good karma” for filling out their survey. This is a ridiculous marketing message. I’ll give you, a for-profit business, more information to improve and generate more revenue. In return, I get “karma”. Are you kidding me?

Don’t insult me. If they had left this wording off, I might have actually clicked on that brief survey and provided some information. After reading that statement, I was turned off by the approach.

The sad part is that I actually had a great experience renting a car through Priceline and would definitely recommend them to anyone looking to save some money on a car rental.

I know many will read the email and wonder why I’m making an issue of this. It’s simple actually. Effective marketing is about providing benefit to the consumer and not the other way around. I don’t care about the business, I care about myself. Businesses need to remember to use this to their advantage.

There are numerous ways of doing this in Priceline’s case. Lower costs, more options going forward, better shopping experience, or improved customer service would all be relevant to their customers.

As a consumer why should I care whether I’m helping this business?

A more effective approach would have been to distill to a sentence or two why filling out this survey would benefit me and not the business.

If only everyone knew how to email efficiently, maybe so many wouldn’t have to claim email bankruptcy. Email overload is an ever increasing problem and Chris Brogan writes an excellent post on how to write email that gets answered.

There are some great tips in there, especially the “one decision per email”:

It seems counter to cutting down on email to ask you to limit the decisions required in a message to one per email, but I’ve seen it have the opposite effect.

I find the simplest solution is the most effective for me.

• I try to answer emails as soon they come in. It would be helpful if emails sent to me were conducive to this (see the link above).
• Filter email that does not need a response before it hits my inbox. Gmail makes this dead simple.
• Create and use an “action required” folder. I succeed on the first part (create), but unfortunately keep failing on the second part (use). As I Twittered this morning, getting to inbox zero by moving messages to an action required folder only works if you actually go back in and check that folder!

The key though is to have a system, any system, for dealing with email. Otherwise, you’ll keep falling in to the same trap.

And then have write a blog post about it…

Just a follow up to my last post on the news of two local companies – if you’re interested in receiving the latest news on regional (Mid-Atlantic, Southeast, Virginia) news and events, I’ve found the following newsletters to be the most useful:

Potomac Tech Wire (DC, Virginia, Maryland)
VA NewsWire (Virginia)
Southeast Tech Wire (North Carolina, Georgia, Florida and South Carolina)
Netpreneur Exchange (Mid-Atlantic region)
Local Tech Wire (Raleigh-Durham, the Triad, Charlotte, South Carolina and Atlanta)

With AOL and Yahoo potentially charging to guarantee email delivery, I suspect RSS will get more serious consideration from marketers. And how can it not? If this email deal holds up (from what I’ve read it’s not finalized), costs will skyrocket for many publishers ($2.5-$10 per thousand emails sent). My overall take on this is the arrangement sounds more little a way to squeeze out revenue as opposed to helping their customers. Regardless, it takes events like these to spur adoption of alternatives. In this case, RSS will be the big beneficiary.

Some other bloggers have stated similar opinions. Steve Rubel has an appropriate take on this:

That’s all folks. The door has officially closed on email marketing. Maybe this will drive more companies to start up opt-in RSS feeds and blogs that facilitate dialogue.

Raj at the The RSS Cases Blog has a more in-depth analysis of the situation as well as his thoughts on a system for RSS virtual email.

Fred Wilson also has a nice summary of the whole situation with a round up of related posts including his thoughts stating:

I suspect we’ve got a ways to go before RSS is truly mainstream. But it seems like AOL introducing a paid stamps mechanism into the email business model is getting people thinking about a way around that and RSS would be a damn good one.

Maybe this email pay-to-play situation will be a nice catalyst for RSS.

Engadget (via incorporated subversion and EdTechUK) has a nice article on how to use a Gmail account as a file server. With Gmail accounts providing 1 gig of storage, this appears to be a cool hack. Looks like there’s a 10 MB file size limitation though. Interesting nonetheless.

Following up on my post concerning the faulty logic used for the Super Bowl productivity waste comes a study from the Center for Excellence in Service at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business and Rockbridge Associates, Inc. calculating the costs of spam. Now don’t take my next comments the wrong way. I feel spam is an enormous problem and a productivity drain. What I do have a problem with is the methodology with which this study was performed.

Spam’s price tag now reaches $21.58 billion annually in lost productivity according to the results of the 2004 National Technology Readiness Survey (NTRS). Findings from the 2004 NTRS, an annual survey that tracks U.S. consumers’ technology opinions and behaviors, indicate that online users in the United States spend an average of three minutes deleting spam each day they check e-mail. Aggregating their usage across the 169.4 million online adults in the United States, this equals 22.9 million hours a week, or $21.58 billion annually when based on the average working wage.

The authors reached a dollar figure by multiplying their 3 minute per day average by the 169.4 million online adults in the U.S. which equates to 22.9 million hours per week. Where do I start with the absurdity? First, “online adults” does not equal “working adults with internet access”. Second, how many of these people are deleting spam that comes to a work email address versus a home / personal email address? To leave this out invalidates the entire study. If an unemployed person spends 3 minutes or 3 hours deleting spam, the action in no way impacts any productivity to any business. Likewise, the casual user checking their AOL email account and spending 3 minutes deleting spam in the evening again does not impact productivity. The key metric here is where the user is checking their email account and to a lesser extent what type of account it is (personal or work).

I recognize and agree that spam is an issue. Really, who doesn’t? I’d prefer to see a well thought approach to measuring its impact though, instead of this nonsense. This just goes to show that statistics can be manipulated to tell any story you want.

While I’m on the subject of spam, let’s talk about what’s more annoying and a bigger waste of time in my opinion – postal mail spam. I get tremendous amounts of junk mail every single day at home and the office. Once you get your name on someone’s list, it’s there for eternity. It takes me about a second to delete email spam. It takes me 20 to 30 times that long to get rid of junk mail. This is mainly because it’s hard to tell the difference anymore between legitimate mail and the junk (especially the mortgage refinance mailings). Unfortunately, I have to actually open the majority of junk mail to make sure there isn’t something important I’m throwing away. Now that is a real waste of time.

Related:

Deleting Spam Costs Billions, Study Finds – Washington Post
ContractsProf Blog
Russ Abbott
Breaking Windows 2.0