I recently bought a Specialized e-bike and it’s great. Every time I ride it I like it more.
However, every time I get an email from Specialized, I get more irritated and less likely to recommend them to someone.
Why? Well, let’s consider this week’s email newsletter. It’s clearly aimed only at e-bike riders and I am sure the marketing team think that means its “personalized” and showing “customer excellence” in some way. However this particular email newsletter focuses on two things – a great new software feature for the bike (which I REALLY want) and the fact that I can get this feature in an Over-The-Air update. Fabulous.
Except MY bike can’t run that feature and MY bike doesn’t support OTA updates. #fail
And Specialized knows this. It knows because I only get the email newsletter because I registered my bike so the same account that they are using to get permission to market to me is one which tells them these messages are going to be unpopular.
If they were focused on deciding what should go in each newsletter based on what they know about that customer they would never have sent me the newsletter. They would have decided which features to highlight based, in part, on my bike and would have encouraged me to go to my dealer to get those features installed. And as I am a recent purchaser, they might have reminded me that its a good idea to get a first service/check up at 100 miles. They would have applied their domain expertise, their business rules, and perhaps some simple analytics about me to make a personalization decision. But they didn’t. They just put in a bucket of “e-bike owners” and spammed me.
So don’t be like Specialized, deliver customer excellence (and personalization) in every channel. #decisionsfirst.
Learn how in this week’s webinar on Delivering Customer Excellence in a Complex, Multi-Channel World – Tuesday 2pm Eastern. Just 30 minutes. See you there.
