Seven Spring Break Diversions for Marketers

Hooray! It’s Spring Break! Time to reconnect with your kids by imposing them on an airplane full of people or dragging them off to grandma’s or holding a Dora marathon in the comfort of your home. No kids? Well you can keep busy during a quiet week at the office while your co-workers’ kids experiment with shredders and glue sticks.

Dedicated marketers can be forgiven, however,  if their minds wander away from picking Goldfish crackers out of the humidifier and consider more grown-up things. Like who the heck scheduled a break with only two weeks left in the quarter? Oh, right. That would be teachers.

To help you cope, here are seven things you can do from just about anywhere that will return you to your desk with a renewed perspective on customer experience and probably a high degree of bitterness about why your results may be a little light.

Try using your website on a mobile device
I know, the Human Factors expert waived some incense at it and declared your site acceptable months ago, but has anyone normal actually tried to, say, order something, look up a product, find a contact name? Maybe it works a treat from your slick Blackberry but what about from an Android phone or an iPhone (held at the correct angle, of course). How does it look on a tablet?  Oh, dear, is that a Flash site? Now is a good time to start your list of people to hurt in April.

Call your main sales line
Even if you’re lolling on a beach some place, you can use the toll-free number to avoid those pesky roaming charges. What’s that? It doesn’t work outside your country? Oops. Let’s assume you get through: time to put on your best customer hat and start asking questions. Ask a few dumb questions about what your products do and how they work. Move on to pricing and technical specifications. Ask a question to which you know there is no answer and see what happens (this one usually works: Does it come with extra squid or do I order those from the dealer?). Count how many questions the rep asks you. Do they offer to send additional information? Do they make a commitment about a follow-up call?  Can you find yourself in the funnel within 24 hours of the call? Within 24 days? Is somebody going to be very sorry in about a week? Bonus points for pretending not to speak English and going all Borat on their asses. Don’t crank call from home; most call centres have caller ID and supervisors with no sense of humour.

Send email inquiries to all the addresses on your website
How long does it take to spit back an auto reply? Does the auto reply seem like it was written by a squirrel? How long does it take to get a real reply? How many addresses bounce? How many emails just go away to live with Jimmy Buffet? For extra credit, why not pull out all your current literature, packaging and customer material and check the email addresses on them (if you make it to Land Before Time 5, this will actually seem entertaining).

Subscribe to your publications
How many inane bits of information are you really asking for? How much of that actually makes it into your lead management system? How long does it take for something to turn up in your inbox confirming your subscription? How long does it take to actually add your name to the list so you start receiving things. Do you get a thank you note? Do you have to decipher one of those oil spill things to confirm that you are a human being? Do you cry more now that you’ve subscribed?

Download some content
This is best tried on your mother’s ancient PC with its sporadic Internet connection. Do you have all kinds of content walls? Do people have to trade in a kidney to get a white paper? Do you let them have it, or do you email a link and then force them past the oil spill before dumping an open PDF at 200% of actual size?  How many of your content links don’t quite work?

Fill out a sales enquiry form
How many fields do you require? How long does it take? When does your blood pressure hit the red line? How many questions are fundamentally unanswerable until your company responds to the enquiry form they will never get because the unanswerable questions are required fields? How long does it take to get a response? How long until your lead lands in the funnel? Would a sales person consider your enquiry a qualified lead?

Apply for a job
Have you been wondering where all the smart people you used to work with went? You’ll never really know that one, but if you look at what your company requires of a prospective employee, you may be closer to understanding why they haven’t been replaced.

Feel better? No? Still have four days to kill with your kids? Repeat steps one through seven with your competitors.

Bizmarketer is Elizabeth Williams
Follow me on Twitter @bizmkter
or email escwilliams@gmail.com