Apple's .mac service changeover to MobileMe was a complete debacle.  The system was down for more or less the day before the iPhone 2.0 launch and for that entire day.  If you rely on your .mac account for your email, like a lot of independent consultants and graphic design professionals, that downtime cost you real money.

I've got a .mac account for backup and file exchange purposes, so the downtime was more of an annoyance to me than anything.  I didn't expect anything from Apple, except an update telling me that everything was stable and an apology.

To my surprise, I got an email apologizing as well as a free month of service.  Smart customer service move by Apple which, like L.L. Bean, knows service.  The cost of providing that extra month of service is ~$0 and should easily pay for itself in forgone churn.

Nice job, Apple.  Email from Apple is after the jump.

We have recently completed the transition from .Mac to MobileMe. Unfortunately, it was a lot rockier than we had hoped.
Although core services such as Mail, iDisk, Sync, Back to My Mac, and Gallery went relatively smoothly, the new MobileMe web applications had lots of problems initially. Fortunately we have worked through those problems and the web apps are now up and running.
Another snag we have run into is our use of the word "push" in describing everything under the MobileMe umbrella. While all email, contact or calendar changes on the iPhone and the web apps are immediately synced to and from the MobileMe "cloud," changes made on a PC or Mac take up to 15 minutes to sync with the cloud and your other devices. So even though things are indeed instantly pushed to and from your iPhone and the web apps today, we are going to stop using the word "push" until it is near-instant on PCs and Macs, too.
We want to apologize to our loyal customers and express our appreciation for their patience by giving all current subscribers an automatic 30-day extension to their MobileMe subscription free of charge. Your extension will be reflected in your account settings within the next few weeks.
We hope you enjoy your new suite of web applications at me.com, in addition to keeping your iPhone and iPod touch wirelessly in sync with these new web applications and your Mac or PC.
Thank you,
The MobileMe Team
Please review the MobileMe Terms of Service.*

*Please note these MobileMe Terms of Service replace and supersede the prior .Mac Terms and Conditions.
MobileMe is available to persons age 13 and older.
Copyright © 2008 Apple Inc. 1 Infinite Loop, MS 303-3DM, Cupertino, CA 95014.
All Rights Reserved / Keep Informed / Privacy Policy / My Info
You are receiving this email from Apple to notify you of service information regarding your MobileMe account.

photo credit: snappybex

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Ever get email that just makes you wonder who's minding the shop?  I was looking to redeem some My Coke Rewards points for a free T-shirt and couldn't find anything in my size.  I filled out an on-site question and got a response back in 3 minutes.

This was good!  Unfortunately it was a response that only told me they were going to respond and triggered some laughter on my part.

The email took me right back to the early days of the first CRM systems and looked like a programmer's "default" response that nobody at Coke's vendor could be bothered to adjust.  Well, it's only been two years since the program launched, so perhaps I need to give them some time.

In all honesty, I truly believe that Coke will put the right sizes back in stock and I'll be happy.  I've never had anything other than a good experience with their products and practically marinade in Coke Zero.  I just wish they'd read their emails before they sent them out.

Summary and key takeaways

1. Check all your customer communications by putting yourself in their place.  That means log in at home, at night and do the strange and wonderful things that our customers do.  See how you respond and see if it makes sense.
2. Put your customer communications on the wall.  The best idea I've heard is to set up a room and lay out everything you do to communicate with your customers, in the order in which it's sent.  On the stuff that doesn't make sense, is off brand strategy or just ugly, tag it with a red sticker.  Then start punching through in priority order, particularly the things that hurt conversion or drive down ARPU or unit of sale.

Read my email chain with KO after the jump.
photo credit: myuibe

Subject:     Re: My Coke Rewards General Assistance
From:     mark@xxxx.com
Date:     June 12, 2008 8:30:34 PM EDT
To:     mycokerewards.general@na.ko.com

Hi,

Well you already did respond to my email and I think three minutes is pretty quick, so thanks.

However, given the choice between a quick response and a slightly slower, but complete answer, I'll take the latter.

Cheers,

Mark

--------------------------------
Mark Pilipczuk
703.350.4720 office
703.xxx.xxxx cell
mark@xxxx.com

On Jun 12, 2008, at 7:48 PM, MyCoke Rewards General wrote:

We appreciate your interest in My Coke Rewards and will respond to your email as quickly as possible.

We thank you for your patience.

Sincerely,

The Coca-Cola Company

[THREAD ID: 1-GW5S1Z]

-----Original Message-----
From: mark@xxxx.com
Sent: 6/12/2008 7:45:50 PM
To: mycokerewards.general@na.ko.com
Subject: My Coke Rewards General Assistance

Hi,

I'm interested in redeeming my points for a T-shirt, but none of the ones you have are in my size (XL).  When will you have sizes other than S and M available?

Thanks,

Mark Pilipczuk

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Every once in a while, I get a great email from one of the many companies I do business with online. Today's great email is from ProFlowers and contains both an outstanding offer and some great strategic thinking.

Unbeknownst to me, ProFlowers suffered from some serious downtime yesterday. And with it getting close to Valentine's Day ordering season, that's a huge problem. The good news is that their website is fixed.

The better news is that I'm saving 15% off my wife's Valentine's Day flowers!

I'm a regular customer of ProFlowers and have been for years. The product is good, the pricing is (I assume) good and they make it their business to stay in touch with me with offers relevant to my gift-giving needs.

Today's email featuring the 15% discount was a surprise to me, as I wasn't on the website yesterday. The email also features a "forward to a friend" option that allows me to extend the discount to as many friends as I'd like.

So why is the potential cannibalization of full-price sales a good thing?

After all, ProFlowers should be able to tell that I never hit their site yesterday and wasn't impacted by the outage. And their CRM system should tell them that I'm pretty likely to buy from them anyway.

But this is a good idea for the following reasons:

1. It locks in the sale. I'm getting hit pretty regularly now with offers for Valentine's Day. This gives ProFlowers a chance at ensuring I buy from them (locking in 85% of the revenue) as opposed to 1-800 Flowers or any of the alternatives (yielding 0% of the revenue)
2. Generates word of mouth. Of in this case, word of blog. The email pass-alongs probably won't yield a lot of sales, nor will this blog post. However, at a very low CPA for the sales they generate (it's not $0 if you assign the revenue forgone to new customer acquisition, although I'm not sure how they're allocating the costs.)
3. Increases the size of the prospect database. As part of the process of passing along the email to friends, ProFlowers generates invaluable data that gives them new prospects to market to or, at the very least, adds data elements to the original recipient's data record.

I'm assuming that ProFlowers is running a series of tests on this email as well and is tracking the performance of people who actually were impacted by the outage, different discount amounts, landing page experiences, etc.

Summary and takeaways

1. Don't obsess about cannibalization. Test discounts and offer differences across channels, and don't let your desire to never cannibalize and sell everything for full price get in the way of a good offer. The caveat of course, is you need to do the math before you dream up a potentially revenue-impacting test.
2. Remember that pricing is fully transparent. If you put an offer out there, the world will know and tell their friends. Use transparency to your advantage to drive WOM whenever possible.
3. It's the offer. As the direct response saying goes, "if you want to dramatically improve your response, dramatically improve your offer."

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Today's example of online marketing waste, which probably went awry someplace in the 4% of process (see Focus on the Four in our featured article section), comes from Samsung in the form of a promotion for their new Blackjack II cellular phone, which is available to subscribers of AT&T's wireless network.

A couple of reasons why it's a good thing I received this promotion:

1. I'm an AT&T customer, meaning no worries about porting my number over or breaking contracts.
2. I used the Blackjack in the past, and Samsung knows that because I registered the phone and my email address with them.
3. I liked my Blackjack phone, although there's no way for Samsung to know this subjective piece of information.

Now, a couple of reasons why it's not a good thing I received this promotion.

1. I'm an AT&T customer, but am currently tied to a contract with my iPhone.
2. I used the Blackjack, but my usage of AT&T's services has gone up substantially since I switched to the iPhone.
3. I love my iPhone and AT&T probably can divine that by looking at my usage pattern with iPhone vs Blackjack.
4. AT&T and Samsung could have avoided reaching out to me by just thinking for a minute or two.

Something's clearly not in sync between Samsung and AT&T Wireless. The Samsung promotion leads to a very nice landing page and the "buy now" link took me right to a page where I could see the offer to upgrade to the Blackjack II. A simple login to my AT&T account, however, reveals the problems that I'm not eligible for an upgrade, etc. etc.

So what would I suggest Samsung do differently in the future?

• Segment. I'm sure Samsung did do a whole series of tests with different headlines, offers, creative and the usual to different target audiences. However, it looks as if they forgot to consider who absolutely wouldn't buy the product. My usage and purchase history of handsets for use with AT&T makes it pretty clear that while I'm possibly in the market for the next generation iPhone, I'm not going to go to the Blackjack, at least not now.
• Share data with your partner. Clearly, AT&T and affiliates sell a lot of Samsung product. I'm sure they've got a close relationship and one that should be able to--once you get your lawyers comfortable that you're on the up-and-up--allow them to merge the email address at a third party. And, at the very least, drop the email addresses of individuals that are not likely to respond, leaving only a small portion of names in as a test to confirm the hypothesis.

Your takeaway: As one of your up front questions when developing campaigns, ask yourself the simple question "who absolutely won't buy my product" and make sure you avoid marketing to them. And then to a clean test to confirm your hypothesis. Then either bank the improved ROI or (my preference) invest it into more big, needle-moving tests.

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