If you happen to be one of the people who took Stompernet up on their “The Net Effect” offer and still haven’t received your product or experienced some delays, you’ll want to take a look at Lynn Terry’s latest blog post.
Lynn was able to visit the Stomper “War Room” and was given the inside scoop on what Stompernet has done and is doing to (1) ensure this doesn’t happen again and (2) take care of those customers who have had delays in receiving their product.
It’s also an important look into how they’re handling what could have been a physical product fulfillment disaster, and a worthwhile read just to peek inside their operation.
The Net Effect is a physical product shipped each month to your doorstep. Most of us deal with digital products, which don’t encounter the shipping and customs problems physical products do. However, digital product delivery is not without it’s problems.
A HUGE issue is email deliverability. Customers on AOL, Hotmail and Yahoo accounts often don’t receive the emails sent to them, whether it be receipts, download links or responses to support inquiries. Stompernet has, I’m certain, encountered this as well: a customer emails with a support question, is replied to but then never gets the response because their email client deleted the message. The customer thinks they were ignored. The product owner is frustrated because they’re trying to help but can’t reach the customer. And both parties lose out.
Unbeknownst to many folks, some email services don’t simply put messages they don’t like into a “SPAM” folder. Some email services simply don’t deliver those messages to you. You never see them. There’s no way to recover them.
An email’s “From” address can be blacklisted, or a domain name, or an IP address. So some customers might get your Aweber autoresponder messages but not your personal replies to their support inquiries, which is even more confusing to them, as they believe that they are getting your messages (from the autoresponder) and therefore think you simply haven’t replied to them.
As a product owner, you need to have an email address for customers to reach you on your own server with absolutely no spam filtering. Ideally, you use a suport desk so that customers can always log in and check your replies (in case they don’t get the email notification of a reply). This way nothing is ever lost.
As a customer, I use an email address on my own domain/server with no spam filtering enabled so that I receive all messages sent to me. If you want to be certain you receive what you’ve purchased, it’s not a bad idea. Gmail has also been kind, I don’t often see a customer with a Gmail address who’s messages disappear. They sometimes get chunked into a “Spam” folder, but they are usually in one’s account, somewhere.
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Tags: clicknewz, email deliverability, email filtering, lynn terry, product fulfillment, spam, stompernet, stompers, the net effect
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As much as we all want internet marketing to be an flawless automated process, I think the Stomper experience points out the need to always be prepared for some old fashioned “service after the sale”. A little more about after sale care of the customer might go a long way on the next million dollar napkin blueprint that comes our way.
And Happy Anniversary!
Mitch G
Great post to remind people how important things are for keeping contact with the customer.
Rightly so, you’re hearing a lot more nowadays about building relationships with your customers.
I think it was John Reese who said earlier this year - the days of the anonymous marketer are gone.
I was unfortunately on the wrong end of the fulfilment issue Stompernet had but the way they dealt with it was fantastic.
November 23, 2008
@John: Glad your issues w/ the Net Effect were straightened out!
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