I travel a lot, mostly for work. And on a recent flight one of the stewards did the nicest thing. He rescued my trench coat.
You’re probably wondering what this has to do with email marketing. Trust me, it has to do with email marketing and a challenge to you. But I digress….
You see, I have a bad habit of sitting on my coat on airplanes. It leaves crazy wrinkles, but it’s easier than stowing it. I left my coat on my seat, in all it’s she’s-been-sitting-on-me-for-years glory, to use the restroom. As I was returning to my seat, the steward let me know that he had seen my coat and taken it to the front closet of the plane where he hung it up.
I have these certificates that American Airlines sends me (see one below). I don’t use them a lot, but when a staff member goes out of their way for me, I do hand them out. So I gave one to the steward. I don’t know what they get, but it appears that they can send them in for some sort of reward.
So this got me to thinking… if this is a way that frequent flyers can let American Airlines know when an employee’s actions have delighted them, is there a way to do this in the email marketing world?
I was reminded of years ago when we developed and tested a program like this for a client, a non-profit membership organization. Most of the emails they sent were offers from corporate partners for things like life insurance and credit cards.
We created these cute icons — I think they were ‘thumbs up’ and ‘thumbs down’ — and added them the bottom of every email message. I have to be honest — they didn’t get used much and we ended up discontinuing the experiment.
But I’m not sure we had really thought it through.
We put these icons on every email we sent, hoping to get more ‘thumbs up’ response than ‘thumbs down’ responses.
But we didn’t put much thought into the content of the emails. We wanted feedback that we were delighting people — but we weren’t actually developing content with the intent of delighting people. The standard-operating-procedure offers just weren’t something that would bring much delight.
So here’s my challenge to you. Try to think of email content that you could send to your list in the next month that would delight them. Something that goes beyond the business-as-usual email that you send on a regular basis.
Something that would cause them to click a ‘thumbs up’ button on the email, if there were one. Or better yet — something that would entice them to give you an ‘in recognition of outstanding service’ certificate, if such a thing existed in your company.
I’m going to work with my clients to do the same. Let me know how it goes and I will keep you posted on my efforts!
