A major clothing retailer was heavily criticized last week for running a promotional campaign tied to Hurricane Sandy. According to a story in AdWeek: “American Apparel sent out an email blast last Monday night offering 20 percent off to customers in nine Eastern states for the next 36 hours—‘in case you’re bored during the storm.’ (‘Just Enter SANDYSALE at Checkout’, the ad gleefully advised.)” The campaign created a lot of criticism on Twitter which was then picked up by the media.
Sometimes, big news events seem like a great opportunity to leverage for opportunistic marketing. Of course, it probably isn’t the best idea to use a natural disaster as the focal point of a sales promotion. Comments by American Apparel defended the promotion as a way to mitigate the loss of sales in their stores that were shut down by the storm; but even factoring out the question of the appropriateness of this tactic, they are missing the larger issue regarding the effectiveness of these types of broad-brush marketing promotions – they just don’t perform well!
Looking at the email from this story, they segmented their customers based on whether the recipient lived in a nine state geographic area. Basically, this is a generic email blast, which does not use any meaningful differentiation to determine who would be most likely to purchase at this time. I recently heard a good description of this method – “spray and pray” (which has even more relevance given this particular promotion). While it’s easy to create a promotion code and send it out to everyone, this approach does nothing to communicate an understanding of the customer, encourage engagement/retention, or build brand loyalty.
Marketers need to think less about hastily conceived one-off tactics and more about building long-term relationships with their customers. We recently put together a set of content that looks at the issues of customer loyalty, and describes how marketers can improve their campaigns through the use of customer analytics, including benchmark data on the types of returns that have been documented. I encourage you to look at the Improving Customer Loyalty e-Kit.
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