A Marketing Lesson for Telkom

As part of my monthly e-mailed Telkom Account, Telkom always include some marketing messages.

You’re busy, we get it

Tick one positive box for their initiative to continue up-selling loyal clients.

In the e-mail the standard header; “You’re busy, we get it. So we’ve handpicked some deals for you,” appears above the monthly offerings.

This month – one of the sales pitches was for a SmartInternet 1GB with HUAWEI E5573 for R99.00 per month.

I duly clicked on the “LEARN MORE” link fully expecting to land on a product page giving me details and a handy Buy Now button.

BUT, I landed on a generic page and scrolling through the ‘Shop by Devices’ and ‘Shop by Plans’ links were a failure.

Using the Search Box on the Telkom web site was also a failure.

I then turned to Google to search the Telkom Site ONLY for the search term SmartInternet 1GB with HUAWEI E5573 — click on the link to see how that is done. That search, too, was a failure.

Having spent enough time on searching for the product, after all; “I am busy, but Telkom doesn’t get it!” I then turned to writing a little explainer for Telkom as to why they didn’t get that sale from me (or anyone else) today!

The bottom line is that Telkom will probably not sell too many of these devices, marketing will blame bad pricing or something else not connected to that department, Telkom will either pull the product, change the pricing or add benefits or some such desperate move rather than just making sure that the dots are connected from e-mail to sales page.