Do you set your Alarm Clock for Online Engagement?
How do you start to develop a relationship with a customer who ordinarily might only visit you and your website infrequently? An essential part of customer engagement is regular interaction. But let’s face it not every website demands regular attention, so what can we do? Well how about Alarm Clocking?
Alarm Clocking is a term I hadn’t come across before its mention on Captology.tv [View the Alarm Clocking video and find out why it is called Alarm Clocking]. However as a practice I remember first encountering Alarm Clocking on the web around 1995/6 on the Agfa website (if I’m remembering incorrectly please let me know).
Each week the Agfa site would offer us a free designer typeface if we could answer three simple questions, whose answers could be found elsewhere on their site. The principle being that if we didn’t visit the site that week we missed out on our free font. Agfa were smart as well, because they always showed us last week’s font just to make sure we regretted it if we hadn’t visited.
The Amazon Gold Box (see top right of an Amazon.com page) works in a similar way, providing you with new personalised offers for one day only. (Although personally I preferred a previous incarnation of the Gold Box that each day offered me a dozen special offers, one at a time. If I decided to click to view the next item the previous offer was lost to me adding extra incentive.)
Each of the above is a great way to encourage visitors outside times of user need. Who knows, perhaps it is even a way of taking advantage of WILFing?
This Alarm Clocking video highlights other more recent examples.
Alarm Clocking is just another excellent example of how Persuasive Design can make an impact on customer engagement.
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Technorati tags: Alarm clocking, WILF, Customer Engagement, Persuasion
