Loyalty Truth

Someone help me. I’m being bullied by Southwest Airlines.

Actually, a better set of descriptive terms would be pestered, annoyed, or amused, depending on the day.

The source of my discontent is my mailbox. Southwest has sent me a solicitation for its frequent flyer cobrand credit card at least once per month for probably the past 2 years. The mailers are varied in style, size, and color, and each are of high quality. I know the airline is spending significant money on each piece. What’s your guess as a direct marketer? $1? $3?

Whatever the price, it’s all being wasted on me and if they continue to send these mailings, I am going to dig out a receipt for the shredder I recently purchased and send it to them for reimbursement. Their mailers being a big contributor to shortening the lifespan of my shredder, it only seems fair.

In all seriousness, I spend a lot of my time sorting through customer transaction data to create Customer Strategy. When we begin to address how to translate strategy into visible campaigns, we focus on a number of tactical elements, forming a program blueprint for operations. The communications strategy is one key step in the process and I am sincere in attempting to help clients manage their finite marketing budgets to their best advantage. The first step to managing resource allocation is to decide “who” to mail and “what” we should mail to them. There are always value thresholds that trigger certain mailings as well as limits to how much we advise to invest in a specific group of clients.

For instance, if we see a segment of customers attractive to the business on any number of metrics, we’ll test various mailings across the group and measure results. I am pretty doggone sure that if I noticed a segment that I had mailed consistently for more than 1-2 years with no response, I would drop them from the list, at least for a while.

None of what I have just written will surprise an experienced direct marketer. Why then does Southwest continue to mail and mail and mail?

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve come to like the airline and its in-flight experience. And their recently re-launched Rapid Rewards program was extremely well communicated via email and print mail.

Southwest is doing some things well, but inexplicably is impacting my impression of its brand with these non-stop credit card solicitations. Maybe the answer is that their bank partner is driving the mailings, and the partner’s desire for new cards outweighs any concerns about customer experience.

Cobrand relationships carry inherent conflict of interest and must be carefully managed. The bank’s desire for new cards can negatively impact customer impressions of the airline itself. Most consumers will only notice the Southwest branding all over the envelope. The bank’s name is relegated to fine print inside the envelope.

Given this scenario, who do you think stands to gain most from mailing me to death, and who is really taking the risk from a branding perspective? Personally, I would like to be removed from their list and have Southwest award me Rapid Rewards points in exchange for all the money they will save on me.

As Paul Harvey says “now you know the rest of the story”.