Steal This #5 – Seamless Warning Emails

Welcome to the latest edition of my new weekly blog series, Steal This. Each week I’ll highlight a marketing activity that a company is using and suggest ways that you can model it and make it work for you. Last week’s topic was – Samsung’s Attack Ads.

Today’s topic is: Seamless Warning Emails

This is actually quite simple, and quite brilliant on the part of Seamless.

For those of you who don’t know, Seamless is an online food ordering platform that has taken New York by storm and is in the process of expanding in a number of other cities across the country. They also recently merged with GrubHub to expand their reach.

Seamless has developed a fun brand, with many loyal users. It’s an easy to use tool that markets itself using humor and offers frequent discounts. One thing that they’ve started doing is sending an email the day before a special offer, announcing the offer and telling hungry customers to stay tuned.

While they may not be the first to employ such a strategy, they do it so well that I had to make them the subject of this week’s post.

So how can you steal it?

The beauty in this type of strategy is that it helps you cut through the “noise” in the email marketing landscape. Customers know what to expect from you and they are actually looking forward to receiving your email. I suspect these emails have a very high ROI.

It’s also very easy to steal if you have a built in customer base. Before you make an offer, tell them to be on the lookout for a special offer. That’s it.

It serves the purpose of getting your fan base excited, and making sure more people see your offer and take action on it.

As always, tell me what you think of this week’s idea and suggest other marketing programs to “Steal” in the comments below.