Monday, February 16, 2015

Woolworths Everyday Rewards incentive not worth the electrons used to promote - Ready to start shopping to earn your $0 Cash for Easter Gift Card?

It was once said, "to err is human, but to really foul things up takes a computer".

I received an Everyday Rewards email this morning and couldn't resist a little chuckle. Looks like someone didn't quite get things right and when you have a mailing list as big as Woolworths, a lot of people will know.


Now which is it? Do I have to spend $0 to get $0 reward, or do spend $0 to get $100 gift card?

I'm sure they'll let us all know.

Over the years I've seen a number of big foul ups and I must admit I've shuddered in horror myself thinking did I or didn't I send that email to the public mailing list. Phew. I didn't, but it does make you worry sometimes.

An exceptionally common error is for businesses to share all their customers including everyone's email address in the To or CC field. One distributor sent me their entire client list for a major telco they were distributing for. How many times do your family and friends send emails with everyone's email address listed?

Another quite interesting story was where a cleaner decided to send marketing emails to a large number of real estate agents in Melbourne with all the email addresses listed in the To field. OK. We all make mistakes. However all hell broke loose. A number of real estate agents had malware on their Exchange mail servers which picked up the mail list and then started resending this email about 100 times a hour to everyone on the list. Some of the real estate agents didn't even know their servers were infected until I contacted them. It took some of them and their IT support up to a week to remove the malware from the server. At least the agents learnt about their infected machines, but there were a lot of very unhappy people flooded with emails.

Do make sure you double check that email you're sending out to your contacts. With automation we now tend to send emails to hundreds or thousands of contacts at a time and it isn't one mistake, but a mistake repeated possibly thousands of times.

Besides, I'm not quite sure how I'm supposed to spend $0!

Kelvin Eldridge
www.OnlineConnections.com.au
Call 0415 910 703 for IT support.

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