Every apology, regardless of what it is for, is an opportunity to communicate, to Humanize yourself, to be humble (or pretend, as I do), and to even [...ulp] offer a promotional opportunity which can lead to a sale. GoDaddy's recent outage was an opportunity, and Bob Parsons (GoDaddy's Founder -- the Bob Guccione of domain registration) seized upon it as a chance to leverage it as a marketing blitz to offer wonderful discounts to all of the customers on his world-class mailing list.
As a matter of course, always take the bull by the horns (as any other part would be unthinkable, as well as unprintable) and admit when you've made a mistake; apologize and offer an olive branch as a gesture of peace. And if you're creative and clever, that olive branch can actually turn a reputation management disaster into a fabulous promotional and marketing opportunity.
Below is a copy of the GoDaddy letter which I retrieved from my spambox:
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 | Call us 24/7: 480-505-8877 | Online: www.GoDaddy.com |
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Dear Douglas Castle (Whom we love and adore),
We owe you a big apology for the intermittent service outages we experienced on September 10 that may have impacted your website, your email and other Go Daddy services. We let you down and we know it. We take our responsibilities — and the trust you place in us — very seriously. I cannot express how sorry I am to those of you who were inconvenienced. The service outage was due to a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables. Once the issues were identified, we took corrective actions to restore services for our customers and GoDaddy.com. We have implemented a series of immediate measures to fix the problem. At no time was any sensitive customer information, including credit card data, passwords or names and addresses, compromised. Throughout our history, we have provided 99.999% uptime in our DNS infrastructure. This is the level of performance we expect from ourselves. Monday, we fell short of these expectations. We have learned from this event and will use it to drive improvement in our services. As a result of this disruption, you will receive 30% off any new product or renewal.* This offer will be available to you for the next 7 days. Simply place source code Apology4a in your cart or mention the code when you call 480-505-8877. It's an honor to serve you. As always, please call us 24/7 at 480-505-8877 — anytime, for any reason. Sincerely,  Scott Wagner CEO GoDaddy.com | ||
It was a classic. It was an apology coupled with a thinly-veiled promotion to retain me as a customer and to call me to action in taking Bob up on this "wonderful opportunity."
Q: What could be more wonderful than learning from your mistakes?
A: Profiting from them!
Douglas E. Castle for The Mad Marketing Tactics Blog, The Internationalist Page Blog, The Daily Burst Of Brilliance Blog And (for a limited time only) Dance SceneWest, which is hosting a disco night featuring France Joli on October 5th to benefit The Children's Cancer Fund. It will be held at The Westchester Ballroom. - If you live anywhere near Westchester County, New York, GO! I'll see you there. No child should have to battle cancer.
#MadMarketing
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