With email, good data is everything.
This afternoon I opened up my email on my phone only to see a message from Boingo, my wireless roaming provider entitled “A Special Invitation from Boingo!” Given that I’ve used Boingo for the past 6 months and had logged on as recently as last night I figured it was some sort of refer a friend, annual subscription or affiliate company offer so it was only out of curiosity that I took a second look from my desktop. You can imagine the surprise I got when I found out that Boingo wanted me to reconsider leaving their services and that they wanted to offer me a special rate to come back – I never left!
This afternoon I opened up my email on my phone only to see a message from Boingo, my wireless roaming provider entitled “A Special Invitation from Boingo!” Given that I’ve used Boingo for the past 6 months and had logged on as recently as last night I figured it was some sort of refer a friend, annual subscription or affiliate company offer so it was only out of curiosity that I took a second look from my desktop. You can imagine the surprise I got when I found out that Boingo wanted me to reconsider leaving their services and that they wanted to offer me a special rate to come back – I never left!
Fearing that my access might be on the way out, my first reaction was to pull up my credit card invoice incase I had slipped through the cracks and was no longer paying but sure enough, there was a charge there. So I took things to the phone and called about the offer hoping to see if I could get my $21.95 monthly bill slashed down a bit. The CSR who answered had me switched out to the promotional rate in literally under a minute without so much as a question. Put another way, I went from happily paying their normal fee to paying half of it because they sent me the wrong email.
On the plus side [for Boingo], they handled the call extremely well. Many companies would have denied me the chance to get the offer which would have meant canceling and calling back in 30 seconds later to fulfill a silly policy; or just canceling outright had I stopped using the service. So kudos to Boingo for empowering their customer service team to take care of things but shame on their marketing team for giving me the wrong email in the first place. They may have also helped to impact my long term retention… who knows, maybe this email was designed with that in mind, although it seems unlikely.
Boingo’s mistake cost them a little over $12 a month from me ($120 in the next year) and I can’t imagine I was the only one to have this sort of “glitch”. And of course I’m blogging about this which means others probably are two… having current customers get in on a reactivation deal is probably not something Boingo had in mind when they sent out the email.
We’ve all made mistakes sending out campaigns but as the subject line of this post says, good data (and the proper logic to execute it) really is everything.
