1-800-Flowers.com uses email as aggressively as anyone out there when it comes to email marketing. From time to time I 
use their service to send flowers to friends and family. Of course, once I identified myself as a customer, their efforts redoubled. Nothing wrong with that except when you – in the interest of both customer relations and sales motivation – send your customer a 15% thank you discount good towards their next purchase … AND … it doesn’t work!
I mean, it’s a great strategy. I’d ordered flowers for my niece’s graduation and 1-800-Flowers showed me some love with a 
discount – no strings attached – for my next purchase. I knew Mom’s Day was coming so I set the coupon aside for use then. As soon as 1-800′s Mom Day’s email solicitations began to pour in I made my move. Ordered pretty flowers; Applied the coupon and voilà – bupkis! So what did I do? Well of course I peevishly canceled my order. I can get what they sell at a lot of places. What they had going was convenience and the warm-fuzzy they’d generated with my previous order. Once they killed the warm-fuzzy, the convenience became irrelevant.
So as a marketer and merchant of whatever you offer you need to keep in mind that good will is a warm-fuzzy. Nurture and feed it and it will nurture and feed your business but if you kill it, you’ll get a Cold-Nasty in it’s place and cold-nasty’s are business killers.
