Netflix. Please Stop.
How a famously data-driven business fails at even basic e-mail marketing.
I love Netflix. I think their service is great, the price point is great and, having had someone hack into my account and watch some terrible films through it, I've enjoyed their renowned top-notch customer service first hand. I love it so much that I burned through every good TV show they had over the course of a year or so and then cancelled my contract, knowing that I'd return in the near future when their catalogue had expanded or evolved.
A few days ago, Netflix tried to reactivate me as a customer. The way they did this was so embarrassingly poor though that someone needs to tell them.
Your data can tell you:
- I used to be a subscriber
- I was a subscriber for a long time
- I watched both TV programmes and films
- I did so, through multiple devices
What part of your customer intelligence data suggested that the key to re-engaging me was clarifying the price and the proposition of your service? Did all of my previous behaviour really suggest that I struggled to understand the core concept of what you offer? No. In fact no form of strategic thinking could lead to this conclusion, even if you didn't have an Icelandic air-cooled data center full of data to prove the opposite of this to be true.
What it does do is communicate that you have no idea why I unsubscribed, even if that isn't the case. I suspect that a business with such a huge emphasis on data and customer intelligence knows better and that you could probably ‘best guess’ me into a segment that you could do something useful with.
You could, if you wanted to, tell me exactly what new shows and films have been added to the service since the time that I left. You have the data to do this. You don't even have to do it at a personal level — you just need to dump me into a ‘month this person left’ bucket and send out the same e-mail to everyone who unsubscribed in that month of that year.
To take it a step further, you could choose to not e-mail me at all unless one or some of the products that have been added actually match my taste profile — and only ever talk to people when it’s relevant to do so.
What you're doing is just lazy. Lazy and damaging. Sending poor quality comms to your customers is a great way of encouraging brand attrition — and can be the difference between someone reactivating as a customer or going “You know what… let’s give a competing service like LOVEFiLM a try instead”.
If you're going to be lazy. Just stop — doing nothing is much better than doing something this badly. Or… you know… you could try to inspire trust in your customers by putting the data you collect to good use.
