So I wake up to a beautiful day with perfect weather and a minimal workload in front of me. It’s amazing, I’m enjoying it. Then I open my email to see the subject “iStockPhoto.com - We miss you.” Naturally, I laugh and open it, curious to see what iStockPhoto has to say:
iStock wants you back. We’ve missed seeing you around our site — the world’s leading royalty-free stock destination. Get easy, affordable inspiration with millions of safe photographs, vector illustrations, video footage, audio tracks and Flash files.
Get back into the iStock groove today!
Come back to us by October 30, 2009 and we’ll give you 15% off 50 or more Pay-as-you-go credits. Enter promo code: M155U42
Sorry, iStockPhoto, but you’ve missed the mark a bit in several aspects. As cute and hard-to-resist-sympathizing-with as your email is, there are several things I think could be done better.
Know your role.
Using your site is not an enjoyable experience for me. Don’t get me wrong, it’s well designed and is comparatively easy to purchase stock photos from rather reliably and consistently. However, I use iStockPhoto as a business tool, not as my personal social loafing grounds. I do not enjoy looking at forced smiles and cheesy, generic scenes all day in their picturesque glory. I go in and get out as quickly as possible, and you do a great job at letting me do this.
To me, iStockPhoto is where I go when a client needs a picture and can’t be bothered to hire a professional photographer or eager young student for their own cause. Frankly, I don’t care if you miss me, so why not remind me of why you are useful to me rather than ask for some sort of second online rendezvous, oddly incentivized with 15% off $50 of credits when you can look at my history and know I never spend more than $30.
Stick to what you’re good at.
You sell stock photos. That’s your thing, you might say. So why not stick to selling me stock photos? Instead of playing to your users’ emotional side for a product that sells rather personality-less bland images (personal opinion), I think if you looked at users’ past purchase histories and suggested some new photos that have been uploaded under similar keywords to what they tend to buy, it would be more effective.
You could use similar but more relevant writing compared to what was in your email; maybe something like…
“Steven, we’ve noticed you haven’t logged on iStockPhoto in over a month. Here are some brand new photos we think you may be interested in using.”
It shows you care about the user’s needs and are willing to travel half way to the transaction point, putting up the effort to show me what I am most likely to need and make the purchase easy to happen. Which approach would you prefer be used with you?
Market individually.
I don’t spend $50 when I use iStockPhoto, and it should be simple enough for you to speculate that I probably would not like to today. Why not offer me a comparable discount for a $25 credit purchase, which I will be more inclined to bite on? Maybe a 10% off? The technology to market to each user individually is easy enough to implement.
These concepts are all just me thinking out loud. I mean no ill will toward iStockPhoto and am a past and, most likely, future customer. If you agree or disagree, let me know in the comments with your thoughts and opinions!
