Ok, this one is a little off the email security topic but I think it’s a fundamental marketing question worth exploring.
I walked in my bank the other day (I like the smaller local banks because I like knowing who’s messing with my money) and they have this big display for Coke on the main table in the lobby. As I walk up to the teller window and start chatting I see that they are offering a free 2 liter of Coke with any new account. So, after my obligatory joke about what happened to the free toasters I had to ask if they really thought offering a $.99 two liter of Coke was going to make one iota of difference in anyone’s decision making process about whether to open an account or not. Needless to say, most in this branch agreed that it made a nice looking display but a pretty ineffective marketing tool.
I left the bank and passed the experience off as one of those little amusements of life. Until yesterday, that is, when I open a local business paper and see another bank who has designed and paid for an entire ad around the enticement of a free box of cookies for opening a new account. This made me start to doubt my own logic now. Are there really people out there saying to themselves “Hmmm, can’t decide which bank to use. Do I want the cookies or the Coke?”
From the very first day of Mailprotector’s launch I made sure that we offered a fully functional 30 day demo without any credit card numbers or other upfront obligations. I always felt like the best way for our customers to know if Mailprotector would work for them is to actually use it. Especially for something as critical as a spam filtering service. I never really thought of it as a marketing gimmick or freebie. Maybe banks should do the same. Let us try their online banking for a while. Let us see if their tellers really are that friendly and their hours convenient.
Please tell me there’s a difference between the cookies and our demo. If not, we may just switch out the demo with a box of doughnuts…
