The auto opt-in

I have been surprised in recent months by the number of ecommerce sites that have defaulted to opt-in upon completion of a purchase.

Opt-in is, of course, supposed to be a voluntary and user-defined action. But it hasn't been that way for me as much as it used to.

As consumer spending slows, retailers, anxious to retain traffic and minimize customer acquisition costs, are taking steps to reach out to shoppers that fit their profiles. And what better way to do that than by hitting up previously converted users?

Interestingly, the sites that have opted me in recently are not uninformed small businesses; they're major corporations with major legal departments, all of whom should presumably know better. Among the offenders:

• Barnes & Noble, where I haven't shopped since 2007
• Citi, for a credit card that gets less than $1000/year in charges
• Home Decorators Collection, after a recent purchase (a Home Depot subsidiary)

Have you been spammed--I mean, opted in--recently? By whom?

Marketing Smarts II

Not to get repetitive, but SeamlessWeb is at it again:



The kicker is that SeamlessWeb doesn't email me much. Once a week, tops. So when these messages arrive, they command my attention. The weather messaging in this context is note-perfect.

When CRM backfires

The Leaders Club, a chain of luxury hotels, recently sent me an email that I had to "renew my membership," which is free. The email did not have any links in the text version. The link in the HTML one sent me to a page with multiple upsells and a small "renew membership" button. Clicking the renew button sent me to the Leading Hotels of the World home page without a confirmation or thank-you page.

Snapfish sent me three warnings in December that they were disabling my account--not because of inactivity, but because I hadn't made a purchase. I could have logged in, emailed a request, posted new photos, sung the site's praises on this blog. But because I hadn't completed a paying transaction in a year, they turned off my account and wiped out my photos.

These organizations share the same shortcoming: in an attempt to cleanse their database of inactivity, they purge much of the loyalty and positive experience that was once part of the relationship. Both companies have a service that I once found compelling enough to join and, in both cases, spend money on. But somewhere along the line, an administrator set a renew-or-kill point in the database.

Consider how the competition handles this. Unlike Leaders Club's renewal request, Starwood has had my Preferred Guest account for years. I use it once a year, give or take, just like Leaders Club. They have twice upgraded me to Gold status after a period of inactivity, to encourage me to interact again. Marriott and Intercontinental send me monthly reminders to pay them a visit, despite the fact that I've not used either account in more than a year. Meanwhile, Leaders Club suggested I'd lose my privileges if I didn't go through the renewal process. Which one is more likely to get my business the next time I book a hotel?

The Snapfish situation is even worse. I have photos on Kodak Gallery that date back to the Ofoto years, and I've never had trouble with my account (although people have lost images due to inactivity in the past). My Flickr account is free and accessible in perpetuity. What makes Snapfish so inscrutable is their hypocricy: I logged in today, several weeks after not taking action on their last "You're going to lose your account" warning, and my photo album from December 2006 is still there.

Maintaining links to opted-in consumers is the prime objective of today's marketplace. Doing it right leads to better word of mouth, retention, and revenue. Do it wrong, and, well....

Social Graphs and Marketing - The Truth

There's a fair amount of excitement recently about Google's Social Graph API.   In a nutshell, the API aggregates various social connections from any number of compliant social networks (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter etc) allowing an application to see the entire picture.  I had a strong hunch that social  networks  were going to break out of their walled  gardens and  just become another app on the internet.  It seems to be happening.

It sounds great, but it might be worth spelling out the driving force behind connecting you all together.  It's marketers, coveting the power of endorsement.

When one person, with no personal stake, makes a recommendation of a product or service to another - that's marketing gold.  No advertisement, no sponsored search result, no viral message comes close to the power of a personal recommendation.   Marketers would love to harness that.

Facebook went down this path with their Beacon disaster initiative.  Every move that a Facebook user made that involved one of their partners was broadcast to their friends.  All of your friends would suddenly be told about the tennis shoes you had purchased.  Of course this was immediately seized upon as a gross invasion of privacy, and Facebook backed down from it.

Still, this shows the real goal of social networking - it's a marketing platform that harnesses the power of recommendation in order to sell things.  It's that goal that drives so many new companies towards the social networking space.  That's what social networking is really about.  Re-connecting with your high school buddies is a side effect.