The Importance of a World-Class CMS

Call it serendipity, but a chance email led to this quasi-follow up to my March 4th blog on rekindling former business relationships.

I received a nice 20% offer from a national retailer to reactivate me as a customer. There were two problems with this:

1. They called me T. Last time I checked, my name is T.J. I’ll accept Theodore or even Ted, as long as my Dad isn’t in the room. But not T. Old Nonciteable Stat: I remember reading somewhere long ago that 60% of adults prefer to be called something other than what’s in most databases. This is a compelling argument to avoid meaningless personalization.
2. I placed a $60 order with this same company yesterday. (For A+ database types: I used the same email and physical addresses as always. Reach out to me and I’ll gladly send you yesterday’s order confirmation and today’s solicitation email.)

Logical conclusion: The right hand (demand gen) at this company doesn’t know what the left hand (ops) is doing.

Easy solution: Either upgrade the automation portion of their CMS or do a database scrub before every mass email send. This isn’t hard for gosh sakes.

Big deal? To me, nah (except, I’m posting it as a learning experience on this website, LinkedIn, to my 3k Twitter followers … hmmm). To someone else, maybe.