On Friday night I was relaxing from a long week and with nothing more important to do, I turned on the TV. My typical TV viewing is to watch shows I have recorded on my DVR or On Demand (Mad Men is a personal favorite), but this time I was stuck watching commercials. So I decided to use it as a research project.
One of the first commercials was from MasterCard with an interesting call to action to visit priceless.com. Well, how could I resist this opportunity to observe how MasterCard has integrated their advertising and web activities?
It’s an interesting site. You can submit consumer generated content by entering your own priceless experience. But something strange happened early in my visit; the site instantly presented me with a survey to offer my input on the user experience at priceless.com. Well, I hadn’t been there long enough to comment, but I thought I’d go for a ride. What I found was disappointing; it was a long survey with questions that were not relevant to my experience on the site.
I think MasterCard is on the right path, but there is definite room for improvement. Here are a few observations from a visitor sincerely interested in their approach:
- Don’t start asking questions until you engage me. Find a way to draw me in with interesting content and after I’ve been there for a while, or return, engage me in a dialog, not a one way survey.
- The 0 – 10 scale is backwards relative to best practices that put 10 on the right side and 0 on the left. Ok, that’s being picky, but expected as a Net Promoter practitioner.
- Don’t ask questions you can answer yourself. The questionnaire asked where I came from (direct, search or referral), can’t your web data tell you that? Even better, let me put in my name and zip code and look me up, act like you know me!
- Create compelling content that makes me want to engage. For example, a travel section on current travel offers for MasterCard customers. Make me want to be a MasterCard customer and move up the loyalty ladder by seeing what I’m missing.
- The site was interesting for entering and viewing priceless picks. This demonstrates it’s a campaign, not a community. Use this opportunity to build a relationship with your customers and/or prospective customers, not just an extension of your ad campaign.
After my visit to priceless.com, I visited many of the other advertiser’s sites; no one had quite integrated their website with their ad campaigns yet. The key here is YET, these guys are spending enough money, sooner or later they will see the opportunity for using ad dollars to engage customers in communities that build loyalty and increase word of mouth.
Have you seen someone that’s done it right?
