So imagine my frustration when a lazy marketing email arrived in my inbox from Netflix, a company that I’m a big fan of and I’ve written about in the past. It was a win-back offer asking me to renew my recently cancelled subscription. I had closed my account when Netflix announced that their 1-DVD rental/unlimited streaming service was increasing from about $10 to $16 per month earlier this year. Actually, I considered subscribing only to their streaming service but felt that the value wasn’t there at the $7.99 per month price point. While I am a believer that streaming media is the wave of the future, I felt that the Netflix library (or anyone else’s these days) is a bit anemic. So shortly after shutting it down, the win-back emails started rolling in and while I ignored the first one or two, I started to notice a surprising pattern.

The imagery and copy varied slightly between the emails but the offer was always the same — $7.99 for streaming service (see for your self below).

Email #1 (click to enlarge):

Email #2 (click to enlarge):

Basically, the Marketing team was using two win-back email templates, and these templates were being “personalized” by inserting my name, which is an emailing marketing 101 tactic. Now for a company that’s recognized for their data mining prowess, I am surprised at how little of my user data was introduced into the email, especially when considering that higher levels of personalization drive engagement and that most ESP’s (email service providers) have significant built-in email personalization capabilities, like showing your prior viewing behavior. If you’re looking for solid example of such marketing efforts then check out the 26% increase in open rate and 2.3% average sales conversion rate that Ice.com experienced when they started personalizing email offers earlier this year.

I do realize that win-back emails were probably a low priority for the Marketing team since Netflix saw robust subscriber growth up until October, which is when the price increase drove 800,000 subscribers to turn off their Netflix service. But I would have expected that by now someone in the Marketing department would have experimented, maybe just a little more, by adding a template that varies more than the messaging. How about changing the offer? Considering that Netflix spends approximately $0.05 to deliver a 2-hour movie, I would need to watch 5+ movies a day on a $7.99 per month account to break the business model and I doubt that most folks have that kind of time. At the very least, applying such a simple solution would buy time for the Netflix Marketing and the Data Science teams (aka, data mining team) to join forces to devise an alternate and probably more elegant, data-driven approach to bring subscribers back.

What’s the worse thing that could happen? You may even net me back!

I recently broke down and purchased an iPhone 3GS . I resisted to become enslaved to another electronic leash. For those that don’t know what I mean, it is the nickname for the BlackBerry that I carried for almost two years in my prior job. I saw it as a leash because of the blinking red light. For the uninitiated, it is the indicator light on a BlackBerry for new email messages. Like many others hip carrying users, I initially fell in love with my BlackBerry device because it allowed me to peak at my inbox. The pain of spending 5 minutes waiting on my laptop to reawaken from standby, log into the corporate network and fire up Outlook went away with a BlackBerry. But before I knew it, I was trained like Pavlov’s dog to look for the blinking red light. It was a vice that I was glad to be rid of for good, or so I thought.

As I debated the purchase, I wondered if my crackberry habit of checking my email would resurface. I knew that I was somewhat safe because Apple didn’t put an indicator at the top of their iPhone. Also, the iPhone has an option to turn off the sounds when a new message arrives in the inbox. It was amazing how I could be in control — I could set aside time to look at emails instead of stopping whatever it is that i was doing and rushing to my device to look who wrote me or what blew up (if there’s an emergency, they can always call!).

So at this point, I’m only a few days into this “experiment” but I’m already realizing why so many people are fans of the Apple brand. It managed to be totally focused on serving consumers like me.