CyberMonday is becoming one of the most critical days for retailers today. According to IBM, Cyber Monday retailers saw online sales increase by 16.7 percent over last year. Retailers are using email and social offers to get the attention of their customers. In fact, according to IBM’s research:
On Cyber Monday alone, IBM clients sent nearly 500M email notifications to consumers around the world – a one-day record high. Mobile push outreach continued its rapid growth and was up 47 percent over 2015.
It was no grand surprise when I received an email from BaseballExpress.com with their CyberMonday deals. What was a surprise was that they offered a Wilson baseball glove deal for $19.88. They claimed it as a $140 savings. Meanwhile, when someone clicked through to the website the price was over $200. What looked like a great attention grabbing deal turned out to be a click bait and switch. Looks like someone made a mistake and didn’t check the image when they sent out their email. You can see the image below.
These kind of printing mistakes happen. I think we all understand that. A similar thing happened to Macy’s when they priced a $1500 necklace for $47. But, a brand is built on relationships and how you handle mistakes is vital.
I emailed BaseballExpress at around 7:30am. I told them about the pricing discrepancy and asked them how they were going to handle it. It wasn’t until after 4:30pm that I received a reply from them:
How would you feel at this point? Would you feel that they used false advertising to get you to click through to the website? Is there something they could have done at this point to at least make you feel better about their brand, especially after they admitted they made a mistake?
At this point, I re-checked their email and they had swapped out the original image with the corrected price. There was no second email apologizing for their mistake.
Continue to read on LinkedIn to find out the rest of the story and how they could have handled it.
A couple of keynotes you may want to watch
Jeffrey keynoted the Conversion Hotel event in Amsterdam and spoke about Conversion Rate Optimization Maturity.
I keynoted ConversionJam in Stockholm and presented the 4 Pillars of Amazon Success.
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