Customers should not have to spill blood to leave you

Cannot help but agree with Seth Godin when he argues you should make it simple for customers to leave you. 

“The number one reason consumers don’t sign up for your free trial is
that they don’t believe that it’s really free, and that they are sure
that once the trial is over you’ll figure out some way to harass them,
steal from them or otherwise make them sorry they trusted you.”

Any customer that has cracked their head on the brick wall of “customer service agents” for phone companies or book clubs know this feeling very well.  And do you think a single one has a pleasant thing to say about that organisation?  Nope.  Indeed, it has taken me 3 months to have myself removed from a book club’s mailing list – and I have no clue how I ever got on it in the first place.  In the end, I had to physically phone them and then insisted on speaking to a manager directly.  Geesh – where is the word service in such customer experiences.

It is all too easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the more barriers you put between the visitor and a newsletter “unsubscribe me” option, the fewer will opt out.  Sure, this might be the case but how many will, instead, report you as spam.  If our historical evidence is anything to go by – lots.  Recently, we have taken the opposite approach and gone out of our way to reply to all unsubscribe requests personally – even to the extent of asking them if they would mind explaining what we did wrong and how we could fix it in the future.  This has had exactly the result we needed – many surprised visitors saying how pleasant it was to have a real human bother to respond and actually seem to take notice of their feedback.  Unsubscribe rates have begun to fall, retention rates are rising and we are gathering oodles of great feedback for the next time we revisit our newsletters and sites.

A sad, sad world however, when human based service is the exception rather than the rule!

Seth’s Blog: Hard to say goodbye

Cloaking good or evil?

Cloaking good or evil?  Does it depend on your site’s reputation as far as Google is concerned? Does Google Allow Cloaking When They Like the Site?

Now this is not just an esoteric question for us.  The majority of our material is locked behind at least a free registration screen – and the very best behind a paid membership program.  Now if Google are serious about indexing the deep web then our situation must be taken account of and some solution provided to at least expose the value of the non-paid for material.  Sure, we can cloak for now (and probably get away with it) but this only a band-aid, and a germ ridden one at that.

I know Google have a premium content programme but it seems to have gone very quiet.  Please Google, speak to us content owners that need to make a living from our material rather than rely on ads.