November 22, 2007

How To Use E-Mail Marketing to Kill Off Your Customers

I live in Army/cargo pants.So the 10% Thanksgiving sale offer from Gr8gear really resonated. Until I tried to make a discounted purchase.

I got the e-mail, noted the times when the coupon was valid, pre-shopped for my pants and waited 24 hours. I get to the site, click in my stuff and quickly rack-up more than $50 dollars in goods to qualify for the discount deal. I put in my info and the shopping cart won't take the data. I try again and again. No deal.

Then I notice a red sentence peeping out of the black background that reads -- "Coupon code cannot be used on specials or closeouts."

I check the cart. Both sets of pants we're marked down from 29.99 to 22.99, I check the offer e-mail. Not a peep. The right nav bar tells me my pants are to sellers -- not closeouts. I'm stunned. I'm shocked. I'm really pissed off. I've now invested 20 minutes to buy stuff I crave and my warm feelings have turned to anger and resentment.I've gone from repeat customer to angry antagonist with zero sympathy for the marketer that didn't do his/her job right.

Wanna kill off your repeat buyers? Send them e-mail offers that they can't cash in on !   

Nov 22, 2007 11:10:02 PM | Email

2 Comments

rowery

"How To Use E-Mail Marketing to Kill Off Your Customers" - Good article. Congrats.rowery

Posted by: rowery | January 06, 2008 at 10:29 AM

Mark

Danny,

That happened to me before with a company I often have purchased wholesale industrial supplies from. They sent me an email with a discount offer of 10% but when I visited their site to 'cash in' I learned the discount did not apply to existing customers. Now I understand that getting new customers is important but what this kind of offer tells me is I'm not as important as an existing customer and frankly, it's a dumb marketing approach.

Posted by: Mark | November 27, 2007 at 10:06 AM

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