Lead Nurture Campaign Blunders - More Fun With Hurricane Electric

Email marketing and lead nurturing campaigns are not new. Done right, it can be a great way to draw in business. At the same time, one factor that you might want to consider when shaping your lead nurture program is the current status of the person in the campaign. Simply, if you have a customer or a prospective customer in your database with a negative relationship with the business, you may not want to include them in a default promotional program. Here's an example.

I'm pretty unhappy with Hurricane Electric right now. If you aren't familiar with the back-story, you might find this recent post amusing. While it's not a flat out "Hurricane Electric Sucks" post, I think you can detect the unhappiness in my tone -- and you're not reading the original emails. I don't think that the people over at Hurricane Electric would be surprised to learn that I'm not happy with them nor would I recommend their service going forward.

So imagine my surprise when I received an email from Hurricane Electric the other day offering to upgrade the service that I was just trying to cancel about a month ago. A new server? No. A cloud hosting option? No. An unused copy of Windows 8? No, something of even less use to me. That's right, they wanted to offer me an upgrade on bandwidth to the server that is sitting in their data center, idle. When you see something like that, it really catches your attention. How disconnected is it? Let me count the ways:

1. We just finished a series of communications back and forth about how I wanted to cancel our service
2. It was offering to increase bandwidth to a server that is essentially idle
3. It promoted the idea that the increase in bandwidth would help our business earn more by increasing traffic and overcoming the limitations resulting from our current bandwidth

What stood out even more was that the bulk email listed the sender as the very same accounts payable person that I had just been arguing back and forth with about closing our account with previously. It's laughably bad. 

Know Your List
If you want to run a nurture campaign, consider reviewing your member list and removing anyone with cases or customer service issues. You also might want to consider using cases and other customer service issues as a trigger for a different type of email campaign as they may not be suited to an upsell campaign.