On Monday the 4th I went to pick up something at the post office of that same store. And I remembered I needed some bar soap. Cha-ching, another 120 points. Here, I thought, was a merchant who really gets it. I'm spending money I usually spend at other retailers here, at this store, because of the rewards. And, frankly – d'uh. That's how a loyalty program works.
So imagine my surprise later this week when I got home and opened this email:
“Are you still there?I was going to be fired as a customer. For using my loyalty card to buy hundreds of dollars of merchandise at their store!
Hello!
We’ve noticed you haven't opened our emails in a while. If there continues to be no activity, we will soon have to unsubscribe your email address.”
How can they have created a stack where, even though I am loading offers on my phone from my emails into their app, and buying products on both a promotional-driven and a daily needs basis, there is some feed that cannot see any of those transactions and decides to fire me as a customer?
This is a retailer whose marketing department is staffed by people who are not in the first quartile of any cohort.
The moral of the story is “watch your stack”. Don't pull a data feed of customers to fire without parsing a feed that shows you customers that have just purchased. In fact, better yet – don't fire your customers using a loyalty program.
BTW worst of all, the only way to re-enroll in the program is to follow phishing-scam style links to dodgy login pages. Priceless.
And PPS. Of course I can't send them an email capturing the above information. Their loyalty campaign emails are do-not-reply.
