Market Like You Mean It

I know, there are plenty of places to buy furniture in south-east Idaho. But I’d like to talk about one company that I will always go back to. And no, this isn’t a paid post. I’m really a big fan.

When my wife and I were engaged, we were looking for a mattress for our new apartment. We looked all around Idaho Falls. I even remember calling a few places in Pocatello to get prices (one we knew what we wanted). I remember visiting Furniture Row near Edward’s Theater. They had a lot of nice stuff, but their employees were super rude. We didn’t feel welcome at all. And I won’t go to Odell’s because their ads are obnoxious (”We’re closing early on Friday to get ready for our biggest sale ever on Saturday”… aired every other week)!

Then we went to Romaine’s. Romaine’s is this little cramped place in downtown Idaho Falls. (Okay, it’s actually huge inside but the layout is strange and so it appears to be very small until you start exploring.) They’ve got tons of great furniture. For some reason they call themselves a mattress store (technically they’re called Romaine’s Mattress King), but they’ve got so much other furniture that I think they should change their name.

We worked with Carey (who is also the owner). He helped us pick out our first mattress. He explained all about how mattresses are made and how to choose just the right one for your individual sleeping needs. On top of all that, he gave us a killer price (because it was our first mattress purchase…a kind of wedding gift I guess) and shipped it to our apartment 30 minutes away!

Here the best part though and the reason I thought it was worth writing about. After we’d been using the mattress for about a week, we realized that it was too soft for us. We both liked something a little firmer. I called up Carey and asked if they had a policy for this type of thing. He said, “I’ll send you a firmer one.” Low and behold, a day later, the shipping guys showed up to take our old mattress and drop off a new (more expensive) one…at no cost. We’ve been sleeping better ever since.

So why did I write this post? Well, this blog is (supposed to be) all about how to improve your company’s marketing. And I can’t think of a better marketing strategy than making your customers happy. Romaine’s went well beyond the call of duty to help us find a mattress that would work best for us. And for that, we’ll always go back.

You got me, I’m a convicted “early adopter”. That can be fun when you adopt something that is cool and eventually becomes trendy and you can say, “Oh yeah, I’ve been using that for ages.” But it’s not so cool when you adopt something that totally b0rks your workflow. Boxbe is that something.

I read about Boxbe a couple of weeks ago on GigaOM. He called it a “cool add-on for Outlook” and explained how they even offer it for Yahoo! Mail and Gmail users. It sounded pretty helpful, so I figured, “If it’s good enough for Om, it’s good enough for me.” Boy was I wrong. Boxbe sucks.

Not long after setting up my Boxbe account, I discovered that I wasn’t receiving ANY emails in my Gmail account. I had already gone through the process of telling Boxbe who I approved of but that didn’t stop it from filtering out everything. I quickly found that it’s necessary to first log into Boxbe and approve all new messages. Then you can go into Gmail and read ‘em. Trust me, that gets old rather quickly.

Be careful though, because after you go compose a new message, Boxbe intercepts it and places it into the trash. You have to manually go find it and then click on “Move to inbox” before it’ll appear in your sent folder. Can you say “Royal Pain”?

Since when did just clicking “Report as SPAM” become so difficult? Do we really need another service to get in the way?