Couple of lessons to be learned from a recent Frontier Airlines promotional email.
- Urgency is good for motivating action. Use it.
- The internet is not a perfect delivery medium.
I was all set to jump all over the special promo fare that Frontier was offering to the city my daughter is attending college in when I noticed that I’d have to pull a Marty McFly to take advantage of it. In other words, the offer expired before it was even delivered to me.
Look closely at the following screen capture of the email I received from Frontier Airlines promoting a special one day sale in honor of Valentines day.
Notice the 3 circled items…
- They sent this message at 7:02 a.m. on Tuesday, February 14th.
- The offer was highly time sensitive in that it had to be used that same day (2/14), unfortunately…
- I didn’t receive the offer in my Inbox until 1:57 a.m. the following day, Wednesday, 2/15!
My computer was on continuously that day. My email program was up and running and I was checking it regularly. So basically, Frontier’s urgent promo went bouncing around the ether for 19 hours before stumbliing into my inbox. I’ll be honest, I don’t know how many emails suffer this kind of delay or what causes it. What I do know is that it’s not the only one I get like this.
So while urgency + great deal brought me to the brink of purchase; late delivery wiped out this pretty sure sale (and I’ve got 2 friends with daughters at the same school, who knows, I might have organized a dad’s weekend).
We all labor under the assumption that the internet is an instantaneous medium. It’s not. Neither is it perfect. Messages disappear. The ether eats them. They get delayed, as in this case.
Food for thought, as a marketer, you might want to rethink your timing, particularly with highly time-sensitive offers. It might behoove you to launch your urgent offer just a wee bit earlier. At midnight or even the day before to give your messages just a bit more time to percolate through to your prospects desktops.
