On Sun, 4 May 1997 18:31:20 -0400 Seth Dotterer <[log in to unmask]> said:
>Some of us use listserv as a marketing tool, where swallowing your ego
>and making the customer happy is the prime goal.
Indeed, but if you send an announcement to (say) 500,000 people, I can
guarantee that 500 are going to be so upset with the contents of your
announcement, the fact that they received it at all, the (totally
unrelated) problem that happened at their ISP at exactly the same time
and that thus can only have been caused by your posting, or just the
phase of the moon that they will swear never to do business with your
company again. That's the rule of the game and you can still build up
customer fidelity among the remaining 499,500. However, I doubt you'll
find even 5 people who write back to complain that the name of the list
was in caps and consequently they will never buy from your company again,
and if you did and you changed it, you'd find a similar number of people
to complain that the name of the list should have been in caps. People
just like the things they are used to. People who are used to Majordomo
will expect lowercase list names and people who are used to LISTSERV will
expect upper-case list names, the only question is whom you want to
annoy. Similarly, most people find numeric time zones counter-intuitive
and some find them downright offensive, although most techies swear by
them. I mean, can you tell me which major cities -0800 corresponds to,
without looking it up in a document? I can't either. Oh, and many
Americans have actually complained to me over the years that the time in
the date field was offensive and should be written down as am/pm, which
of course the standards do not allow, so it is a non-issue, but anyway,
24h time appears to upset people in the US because it is used only/mostly
in the military (in Europe it is used by everyone and thus a non-issue).
Me, I find mm/dd/yy dates bordering on insult, because I have to figure
out if it is mm/dd/yy, dd/mm/yy or yy/mm/dd (all formats which are in use
in countries that I do business with on a daily basis), and I simply
*can't* believe that people are planning to continue using this
ridiculous format past 1999 when I am never going to be able to figure
out 02/03/01 from 01/03/02. I have complained about this on a few
occasions, but the world does not seem to have changed to please me, even
though I actually have a sound, practical, $$$-saving, mistake avoiding,
non-emotional reason for wanting to see ISO date format take over.
Anyway, in the end, when a customer writes back to complain about the
case of your list name or your offensive usage of military time in the
mail header, he is really telling you that the announcement you posted
missed its target by a mile and simply did not manage to grab his
attention, which instead drifted to little details which were not
supposed to be part of the message at all but had to be included for
technical reasons. In my experience, the vast majority of negative
replies come from people who either did not expect to receive this kind
of announcement when they signed up (or forgot that they signed up a year
ago, and that is how long it took the company to make the first mailing,
so the user completely forgot about it), or are due to the fact that the
person who wrote the announcement came up with a piece which sounds very
much like a $19.95 motorized dog leash spam, and was treated accordingly.
Regretfully, the latter is VERY common. Most traditional marketing people
simply have no idea how to write an announcement for an Internet
audience, which is not really their fault but unfortunately most do NOT
want to receive advice in the matter from people who do not even have an
MBA. They view constructive criticism as an insult rather than as the
free, valuable advice that it is. We recently made a pair of
announcements for a customer using the same list, one of which was
written by one of their contractors, who as it turned out was interested
in what we thought about the wording. There was a factor of about 100 in
the number of complaints between the two, yet they said pretty much the
same kind of thing, just in a different way.
Eric
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