Mostly Matt

About a year ago, I did some comparison shopping between DISH Network and DIRECTV’s satellite TV offerings before I ended up choosing DISH. Ever since then, I’ve been receiving direct mail pieces from DIRECTV at least once every two weeks promoting their services and trying to convince me to sign up with them. They send the same exact letter and inserts with every mailing. It goes directly from my mailbox to my trash can without a second look.

Now, I don’t have anything against DIRECTV, but this type of marketing is definitely not going to get me to switch. Here is a situation where a company is flushing their marketing dollars down the toilet when they could have spent five minutes getting to know me and personalizing their marketing campaigns.

With my name, address and email address on file, DIRECTV could’ve easily found my blog, social media profiles on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, the company I work for and probably much more. A mere five minutes of web surfing would reveal that:

• I’m a huge sports fan, especially football, and my team’s games aren’t always on TV (NFL Sunday Ticket)
• I enjoy a wide variety of movies and TV shows (Premium channels on HBO, Showtime, etc.)
• I have a Blackberry (Mobile TV)
• I’m online all the time. Duh. (Program DVR from the website, view statements and pay bill online)

These are just a few quick examples. Who knows how much information DIRECTV could be getting with 15 or 30 minutes of research per customer. It’s clear that marketing to lost opportunities is important to them, but why continue to create noise when the ability to create a profile about me and my likes/dislikes is right there on the web for the taking? You hear so much about recruiting using social media – sourcing candidates on LinkedIn or background checks on Facebook – but why not more about prospecting with the same social media tools? Traditional tactics are clearly not working as well as they used to.

Is a new sale worth five minutes of your time? I’d love to hear your opinion on this issue in the comments below.

Tags: DIRECTV, DISH Network, personalized marketing, prospecting, satellite TV, Social Media

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 at 12:02 am and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.