Amazon sent me some seriously effective marketing

So here’s what happened. Typically when Amazon comes to my doorstep, it comes in the form of a parcel or a package or something that is physically sizable. A few weeks ago I received a letter from Amazon…..just a regular, run of the mill letter. No frills or nothing. When I opened it I found that Amazon sent me this letter expressing some level of concern over the fact that I had not yet activated my Amazon Prime TV account. We use my Wife’s account, so there is no real need to do so.

I’ll be perfectly honest; when I was thinking about writing this post, I was considering making fun of Amazon for doing this. In my defence, one of the largest tech companies in the world sent me a paper letter. As you might imagine, my initial reaction was why wouldn’t they send an e-mail about this? I was chatting with my wife about this, and she decided to wave her hand all “Jedi mind trick” style and make a damned good point to me.

“If you got an e-mail about your prime account you would probably delete it, I do all the time, Amazon sends a zillion e-mails a day, and I only open the ones about orders, I delete the rest. This way it ensures that you read their junk mail.”
I quickly conceded that it was a good point (as I usually do when she’s making sense) and have given this post a whole new thought. For sure e-mail marketing is the way of the future, but there is something to be said about getting a letter nowadays. I’m sure that you are like me, in that you get 20 or so e-mails from companies and whatnot that are trying to get your attention, and there would be very few actual letters that people get any more so what better way to get your attention.

Not 30 years ago the reverse was true. People typically would get letters for everything. Bills, Correspondence, special events, would all come through the mail. Now however all of that comes through e-mail. We all get however many e-mails a day, most of which we have to pay attention to. We get bills, invites to various events, correspondence from friends and family (and occasional updates from your favourite blogger) and all that is very important.

I know that in my personal experience sends me quite a few e-mails. There are the ones that I certainly pay attention to like shipping notifications or the receipts for the stuff that I buy, for sure I open and look closely at those e-mails, but they also send me other e-mails. They send me e-mails about things they think that I should buy based on the stuff that I looked at or what their algorithms believe I should look at, and I’ll be perfectly honest, I delete a good 90% of those without looking at them. I appreciate that Amazon would want to make sure that I see certain things, undoubtedly because there is so much stuff on the site there is boatloads of products that I would likely miss. The problem is that I don’t look at all the e-mails.

This is why Amazon sending me the letter asking me about my Prime TV account is so brilliant. Honestly, when I saw it, I was deeply curious to know what was going on. My wife pointed it out to me. “Amazon sent you an actual letter.” and in my head, I was thinking “This must be important.” While it turns out it wasn’t THAT important, what is important was that it was very attention-grabbing for the end user (me).

In today’s world where most of us get many e-mails and so much junk mail, it’s easy for a company trying to grab your attention to get lost in the shuffle. For a company that is billed as a tech giant, you can be forgiven for thinking that e-mail would be the only method of communication. As it would appear, one of the more effective ways of communicating can be the way that you would not expect.

Have you ever received seriously effective communication?

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