Inspired by both my re-read of Timothy Ferriss‘ book The 4-Hour Work Week*, and a lot of recent reading and writing about customer retention, I just created the following auto-responder for all orders that come in from the Family Records store:
Hello!
Thank you very much for purchasing some music from the Family Records store. We really appreciate your support and wouldn’t be able to release all of this amazing music without it.
As a small token of our appreciation we’d like to send you a free digital Family Records mixtape, featuring 8 songs from some of our recent releases. If you like what you hear be sure to visit the Family Records website for more music by all of these artists. You’ll be able to find more free music and if you’d like to support our artist’s eating habits you can even find some of the music for sale in our store!
Click HERE to start your free download. Let me know if you have any questions about your recent purchase, or anything else. We are here for you.
Warmly,
Wesley
The goal of this auto-responder is both to show our appreciation and provide a surprise bonus for our customers (hello Zappos!), but also to expose them to more music from Family Records that can be sampled free of charge and fallen in love with. It’s a cheap and effective way to cross-promote. We started doing this manually for all the folks ordering Wakey!Wakey! EPs in December, post One Tree Hill, and have seen some tweeting excitedly about discovering Pearl and the Beard, Casey Shea or Lacrymosa in their bonus gifts. This auto-responder fully automatizes that process to leave me with more time to spend on other aspects of customer service. Using a bit.ly link also allows us to track the amount of downloads of the free mixtape, keeping an eye on the click-through rate.
* the expanded edition this time.