You open your eyes.
You can see dust particles dancing in the spotlight of the 3 sunbeams coming from the window and landing on the top of the bedside table.
There lies another surprise. A medium-sized navy blue cardboard box, tied by a lighter blue ribbon, with a white card under the ribbon bow. It has your name written on it. You smile, what a great way to start the day.
You pick up the box and sit on the bed. You start pulling one end of the ribbon and the bow loosens smoothly. You’re excited and happy. You open the box and you see a beautiful watch. Now you can’t stop smiling, you’re feeling special, treasured.
You take it in your hand and admire all the details. When you flip it around you notice that there’s an inscription on the back: “Charlie”.
- Who the hell is Charlie!?
This is my feeling about most of the B2C emails that I’m getting these days.
Companies, especially Software as a Service ones, spend tons of resources on customer acquisition and in software to know their clients. They hire full teams to work on Social Media and connect with their audience. They brag about their focus on Customer Service to show how they care about their clients.
They do all this and then they mess it all up by sending emails treating us like 9 year-olds. I’ll get there in a minute, but first let me just make something clear.
You see, when signing up for a service, you usually give your consent to receive communications from the company. Soon you start getting emails from them, sometimes as if they were written just for you.
Of course we all know that that’s not the case. They talk directly to you, mentioning your name because you gave that information when signing up, so when you read “Hey Joe!”, you’re actually reading something like “Hey << First Name >> !”. But we get this, and we understand that this must be automated because they’re sending emails to thousands of people.
And since they’re using the information we gave them, they’re showing attention and making efforts to humanize the automatized…
