Tom Markiewicz

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.

Popularity: 13% [?]

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…

Popularity: 38% [?]