A bunch of marketing things have been bothering me, and a consolidated rant seemed like a good idea.
Email Overload
Zoro sent me a new coupon email today, to help me reorder some of the same items I ordered on Friday and haven’t received yet.
These days I rarely get the good 20% coupons when I need them, and so I don’t mind the email frequency too much. But c’mon – they sent me a coupon email, and then the first item clearly says “not eligible for promo.”
Advertisement
The “YOU FORGOT SOMETHING IN YOUR CART!!” emails that I can’t unsubscribe from are the worst.
I feel that Grainger-owned Zoro and many other huge retailers these days – are running on auto pilot. It’s annoying. Maybe it’s so effective no one cares anymore.
Shady Awards?
A friend of mine was complaining about industry awards, and how their company has to spend more in order to increases their chances of winning.
That sounds awfully shady, and this happens across all kinds of business categories.
A few days later, marketer’s newsletters and posts starting hitting my inbox and social media feed, touting awards they “won” or “earned.” I guess it’s tool awards season again.
Congratulations to all the winners, for your paid-entry accolades, with many if not most seemingly being single player contests.
Advertisement
Whenever you see a company touting awards, ask these questions and see what they say:
Did the brand pay for consideration? What was the criteria for winning? Was there any competition? Was the product even tested?
What do you think about industry, product, and innovation awards?
One Marketing Trick 99% Don’t Use
This one trick is shockingly simple, yet few tool brands utilize it.
Are you ready for the secret to improvements across the board?
Here goes…
Make believe you’re the customer.
I think that this would help improve terrible user manuals, shallow product pages, garbage emails, weak marketing campaigns, and more! Boom – you’re welcome.
Quick Question
If I don’t know you, and you cold-email me with “quick question” in the subject line, I will NEVER do business with your company.
Someone must have passed this off as a marketing tip on social media or something, because I’ve gotten a lot of emails like this over the past year.
It’s become a “let’s trick them into opening spam email” tactic.
Brad J
It’s so infuriating. Zoro specifically, I recent was trying to look up info on an order I had made and I had so much spam from them I couldn’t find the invoice.
Stuart
I’ve been talking with a reader who’s been unable to get Zoro to unsubscribe them.
Some Zoro emails have a link to preferences, but others say you have to contact customer support.
AP
I’ve been curious about them for some time and this post pretty much settles that. Reminds me of trying to read something on your phone as you’re inundated with nonstop pop-up ads.
Stuart
I placed an order on Friday, my first with them since February.
I had a lot of bad experiences with them these past few years, and have started to avoid Zoro unless there were significant savings.
I took Zoro off ToolGuyd’s “stores” page earlier today – https://14cyiuhvcgv.com/tool-guide-where-to-buy-tools/%3C/a%3E .
They have a habit of providing 20% codes when I don’t need them, and rarely when I do. Sometimes the remarketing emails helped me save money on something I needed sooner than the next 20% code might arrive.
They also send promo post cards, “it’s time to reorder” postcards, and similar physical mailings.
Mike
If you use Gmail, it has its own unsubscribe link, so if the sender won’t unsub you, you can use that link. It basically blocks the sender email address.
JR Ramos
That’s a shame you removed them from the list. No doubt their site is a bit wonky and there’s a learning curve to using it smartly and ensuring what you need is in stock or is the right item sometimes (not that different than amazon in some ways really), but they are a tremendous source and sometimes you can find items there that are either more fairly priced or are not found easily anywhere else.
Not long ago you posted that you hadn’t seen a 20% coupon from them in a long time and were wondering if anyone else had. Now you’re complaining about 20% coupons? 🙂 It’s hit and miss but often that 20% does apply to some things that you won’t see much or any discount on anyplace else. I scored several Starrett items with that 20% and almost felt like I was stealing. If it doesn’t work with some brands, ok, fine, but no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater, imho.
I had one occasion to use their customer service (twice on the same order/item) and it was exemplary. They had some Simonds needle files incorrectly listed/described and it turns out they had a snafu in the warehouse with labeling and binning. Sent me a replacement without asking for the original to be returned, then when that showed up as exactly the same error-item as the first, they refunded me for the entire amount including shipping and floated me a (very limited) 30% discount code.
I hate those “you left it in your cart” emails but there are browsing-ways around that for most companies…pretty rare that I get those now unless I get lazy.
Often the Zoro list price is lower than what you see at Grainger but sometimes it’s the opposite. They are aggressively competitive with some things and just the opposite with other things. Always worth a comparison check, though, imho. I think they’re still popular as a house supply where their benefits shine a little brighter, but there are lots of those to choose from these days depending on how much work a purchasing agent/department head wants to put in or how important the pennies are. Like most suppliers that cater to businesses and manufacturers, the experience is often different for the home gamer customers.
Stuart
My test orders went well. I might try one more before moving them back. They’re still not as reliable as MSC or McMaster regarding how delicate stuff is packaged.
JR Ramos
They’ve done ok with me, but it does rival amazon for no-frills packaging. If at all possible I refrain from ordering things that could possibly be bent or dinged in transit and it seems very few will take the time to pad/box/protect those things well enough. I even had some manifold-to-muffler complete catalytic converter assemblies arrive ridiculously bent (one even had the hangers bent in a way that left me scratching my head). Some things could be shipped with a cardboard tube for great protection but I guess those are too expensive these days for a shipper to consider.
JR Ramos
One order – Starrett precision square – was packed exceptionally well. Box within a box and lots of stuffing. That was ironic since it came in a pretty sturdy foam lined plastic storage case anyway, and I wouldn’t have been worried about it being packed loose in a box, honestly. The needle file I spoke of was in a totally empty too-large box and managed to hide itself under the bottom flap. At least it wasn’t in a plastic envelope to poke itself out and be lost in some delivery truck…
Derek
I only look at Woodcraft in Incognito/private browsing mode. I honestly think the “you left this in your cart” emails are why I started buying more from Rockler.
Rog
Oh man, Woodcraft is the WORST for email spam.
Robert
Rockler sends me a lot of E-mails and texts regurgitating products I browsed. But Woodcraft doesn’t, though I do browse through Woodcraft.
JR Ramos
Woodcraft is one of the few that I can’t prevent that cart-email. I also unsubscribed from their email list after two days, and I won’t give them my phone number (nor will I for Harbor Freight or Rockler). I shop in person at Woodcraft very frequently so I just use the website to see if they have something locally…and refrain from ever adding something to the cart online for whatever reason. Rockler is almost as bad, just in a different way, but Rockler is almost worse in person (surely depends on local stores, though).
Jason M
Can I complain about print media as well? Whatever you do, never subscribe to the Uline physical catalog. No amount of phone calls, tweets, emails, etc. will ever get them to stop sending you a 900 page catalog quarterly.
There’s whole internet threads about it and they brag about sending out a million catalogs so do the math
Stuart
While we’re at it, I thought a reader was joking when they warned me about Keyence (https://www.keyence.com/). They gave up after a few months, but it was wild how intense they were. The emails weren’t as bad as the random early morning phone calls.
Any visit to any page on their website triggered more emails and phone calls.
A lot of their emails involved them trying to invite themselves over to provide tech demos for equipment completely unrelated to what I was looking at.
TonyT
Yeah, I try to avoid Keyence’s web site. They do make some good products, and their marketing is very slick, but the products aren’t as unique as they imply. They do pay a lot of attention to their microscope’s user interfaces.
Typically they have very high turnover in sales, but some of the ones who have been there a long time are pretty good.
We’ve used Keyence laser micrometers, microscopes (VK-X, VR), and LJ-X 3D lasers, fiber optic sensors, and safety light curtains. Last time I looked at light curtains, Keyence wasn’t competitive with my top 3, Leuze, Sick, and Datalogic.
Brad
Yea Uline is nuts. I bought a couple of heavy duty storage racks from them 15 years ago and still get there giant catalog yearly like clock work.
I’m sure I marked them as spam long ago.
Mike
The online thing I bought from Uline were mailing envelopes over 20 years ago. Yes, I still get catalogs. It’s like getting phone books, they never stop arriving annually.
mark
I’ve had good success using their online tool to remove my mailings in the past, but priblem is when you order again you’re right back to getting the catalog.
CMF
Isn’t there some environmental group that could give them a PR black eye for all the trees they waste?
Stuart
Maybe, and then they’ll send you countless mailers asking for monetary donations.
My wife gets “save the environment” junk mail, and it’s ridiculous.
Kentucky fan
I used to love zoro but they have gotten obnoxious as of late I agree with everything you said in the article. I really like Williams USA tools I just ordered a set of supercombos from suncoast yesterday hopefully it goes smoothly because while I love Williams tools they don’t have the best web presence.
DRT42
Well, that was kind of depressing to learn about the “Quick question” thing. I almost always send e-mails to companies when I really, genuinely need a short answer to a simple question, with the subject matter, “Quick Question”.
mp
My experience is that ‘quick question’ has made its way into the Indian business schools, like ‘kindly do the needful’. It’s just a turn of phrase at this point.
Usually the quick question is neither a question nor quick.
Stuart
I’ve only gotten spam emails with that in the subject line. If you’ve got a legit question, that’s fine.
But that’s no what’s happening. It’s “quick question” in the subject, and in the copy they’re trying to sell me dental appointment-increasing web services, or fake social media followers.
It’s almost as bad as inserting meme gifs into business solicitation emails.
Jeff
The only awards for products I trust come from Consumer Reports.
TomD
If you dig into even them you find that though they’re aboveboard, their testing mechanisms often leave quite a bit to be desired. They’re best at comparing cars, and even then often miss important factors or care too much about stuff you don’t care about at all.
A useful data point, but not gospel.
Farkleberry
I know I’ve gotten some good deals from Zoro… not like they lost money good deals, but cheaper than everywhere else and free, relatively quick shipping. Can’t recall any problems.
Their M.O. is pretty interesting, as are lots of coupon schemes I guess. They’re only competitive with the coupon, on certain items, and many items aren’t eligible.
My recollection is that once I had enough in my cart, they would send a coupon soon, but not right away, and of course it expired after a day.
Lately I do seem to be getting constant 20% off coupons. Luckily I can’t recall getting print ads, but they probably don’t like me that much, since I would waste an inordinate amount of time trying to get to right around the minimum free shipping by adding competitively priced items to the few things I actually needed.
It’s become second nature to instantly clear the cart when forwarded from email or logged into an account. Lately these “too low to advertise” deals seem like a waste of time, so I rarely click anymore, anyway.
Your 99% marketing trick is spot on. I’ve always thought long term sales relationships are built on sellers understanding buyers’ needs and suggesting the options that will best fulfill them.
I would like marketers to educate me, so I can choose which product best suits my needs, as well as how best to use it.
eddiesky
One thing I am, seeing more of is and email with PDF attachment (its not but instead malicious file or exe disquised, and can hit Mac OS as well as iOS or Windows) and your name, address and phone number in the subject and title.
While I have filters set up, Yahoo seems to let them slip. And from time to time, so does Gmail.
I’m also finding AcmeTool signed me up for something I never asked for. And I know some merchants I uncheck “sign up for discounts and emails” send them anyway. Perhaps I should make friends with tech-saavy attorney and start logging that I unsubbed and count down with spreadsheet. There are fines, you marketing scumbags. There are fines…
Doresoom
I laugh every time I see a brand touting their PTIA for a product that has only been announced, without any available on shelves or even any review samples sent out.
Complete loss of credibility in my view for both the awarder and the awardee.
Stuart
That’s part of it, but I think the more disingenuous part is how marketers run with things.
“This year, RYOBI was recognized with 7 AWARD WINNING tools across various categories. Proud leaders in cordless innovation.”
Okay. Didn’t they PAY to be “recognized” in EACH of those categories?
If there wasn’t any competition, what does it mean if a brand is “recognized” as the best of 1 paid entry for that category?
Even if everything is run as fairly and objectively as possible, there’s no transparency and thus no credibility. What’s to stop the award-givers from creating more niche categories and spreading the competition as thin as possible to ensure repeat award entrants and more fees the following year?
Home Depot gives “innovation awards” to their suppliers. Last year they gave Makita XGT “finalist” status, with badges appearing on most XGT products on Home Depot’s website. And yet the line isn’t good enough for more than a handful of products to ever appear in stores? Home Depot won’t give the product floor space, but they’re award “finalists.”
I feel it’s all just advertising masquerading as something earned through reviews or similar, and it’s pervasive in so many industries.
Last year a tool brand was hyping up “top rankings” when in reality an AI-generated garbage referral site simply took their “World’s Best Pliers” title from Amazon listings and added “Best” at the start of the headline, “in the US” at the end, and scraped Amazon for an auto-generated list of 10 random selections.
Anyway, in addition to “awards” being given to advertising blurbs for products that haven’t launched yet, there was at least one past award for a product that never launched at all – it was scrapped prior to production and release. That was the moment I stopped giving tool awards the benefit of the doubt, when an award was given to a product that would never actually exist.
fred
My thought is that the use of AI by savvy and unscrupulous marketeers will only get worse. Once marketers can drill down and understand each individual consumer and what drives their purchasing (impulse or otherwise) decisions in real time – I can see a time when we will get electronic sales messaging that just happens to pop up when we are in the market for what the fellow is selling. Then we might say to ourselves (as the seller hopes) – “wow what a coincidence – I was just looking for a deal on something like this.” – and be prompted to buy what’s on offer.
Stuart
Some sellers will remarket with a promo code, which has trained me to not order right away and to wait to see if I can save some money.
Zoro does that too, so if I don’t have a current coupon code, I’ll wait for my cart abandonment to trigger an automatic email.
The issue is that marketers aren’t drilling down to understand consumers, they’re applying broad tactics that lose efficacy and become annoying.
A woodworking brand sends emails every day. Last Thursday there were 7! I’ve been convinced not to buy anything from them unless it’s on sale or otherwise discounted. When I visit the store, that triggers even more “what can we do to help” types of emails.
It’s excessive.
I have nearly 82,000 unread “promotional” emails in my inbox. Every so often I unsubscribe and delete a lot of them, but the number keeps soaring upwards.
There’s a seed company – Territorial seed – that sends about 2 emails a week on average. They recently send a erroneous email about a particular kind of garlic being out of stock, and having to provide a partial refund. I didn’t order garlic from them this year.
They sent another email apologizing for the errant email, and for any confusion, and provided a “SorryAboutTheEmail” coupon code because they “dislike superfluous emails as much as you do.”
Does anyone want to receive 7 emails a day from a woodworking brand and store?
Some companies put themselves in their customers’ shoes, and others don’t but should.
fred
Those woodworking folks, with a bird as part of their name, sure have gotten excessive. I own some of their tools – and have a range of emotions about them. I probably have bought on and off from them since 2007. Some items have proven useful – others I feel that I got sucked into buying by advertising hype. Their one-time-tool (sometime repeated) marketing strategy probably did help to suck me into buying a few items.
Their emails seem to come via different “addresses” – one purporting to be an e-club, another about new items, still another about a sale and yet another from their router bit brand. As you say – too much! I sort of like to keep up with what they are doing – as entertainment – but the deluge is becoming very annoying.
Ryan
Zoro has been emailing 20 percent off every few weeks. They will do a specific 20, then a 15, then another 20 on everything. Problem is they are only good for a couple days. They have also been real mailing 20 percent codes with longer expiration dates. If i don’t have a coupon, i just put an item in the cart and a 15percent will appear in a day or two.
After I placed an order the other day with a 20 percent coupon, they emailed another 20 percent coupon.
Mike
All of this is why everyone should have a throwaway email address to use for subscribing to stuff. It’s easy to set up extra Gmail addresses, and you can have all the other addresses forward to your main email. But if you get an email via one of the throwaways, if you want to reply, it will look like it’s coming from that throwaway address.
It seems as soon as you order something from anywhere, they start sending daily emails. The only ones I actually look at every day are B&H Photo Video and Harbor Freight, sometimes there’s actually a deal on something I want or could use. But the first thing I do in my email each morning is delete everything I don’t want to see. Every now and then, I get an email that says “You haven’t opened our email in awhile,” now THAT I find interesting.
KeithinKC
Top of mind awareness is the name of the advertising game. It’s not about quality, it’s about quantity. If they keep their company in the forefront of your thoughts, then you don’t go elsewhere. That’s the thought process.
TomD
They just measure email response rate – how many clicks, how much money. It’s all pointless – the only emails I really like are the ones with a real discount, or a new product I didn’t know about. Those are few and far between, and checking toolguyd.com provides 99.99% of it, anyway.
JohnBCS
I don’t mind Zoro’s emails; I’ve saved a LOT of money with those 20% off coupons on things like stepladders, various mitotoyo and starrett tools, some storage items, wypall, etc.
Woodpeckers are horrible with their emails though. Like 3-5 a day.
Kyle
I would like to nominate (they didn’t pay me for it, I’m just that kind) Harbor Freight for the “email overload” award. I know what Harbor Freight sells. Any time I’m in the market for any new thing I suspect Harbor Freight might sell, I will check their website. That doesn’t stop them from sending me up to multiple emails per day, depending on my recent purchases or activity on their website.
The most frustrating thing about their emails though, is I remember when they would frequely have 20, 25, 30% off no exclusions coupons. Now the best they seem to be able to do is 30% off “items $10 or less”. Thanks guys. You definitely have some better products than you did 10 years ago, but you’re also still selling a lot of garbage that I’d feel better about buying if I could knock 75$ off the price…
PKS319
My own experience with Zoro has been really good. Prices for industrial items are excellent, and I have managed to buy tools like Proto and Wright wrenches that do not go on sale very much. The Zoro interface and search function has improved a lot and probably two-thirds of my orders are at 20% discount.
Ordering something like 8 foot aluminumn extrusions with free shipping and a discount is an incredible deal. The same is true for unusual fastners, bins etc.
The exclusion on power tools – and accessories such as the Bosch inserts in Stuart’s order – is a feature of almost all of the discounts that Zoro offers. But other than that, there are few restrictions. But – I agree – their software should be be sophisticated enough to prevent the discount codes from being sent for excluded items. Maybe write to Zoro – my experience is that they are pretty responsive.
Stuart
I ordered aluminum extrusions from them a few years ago, and immediately sent them back.
The extrusions arrived partially shrink-wrapped. All of the ends and some of the edges were scraped, and there some kind of chemical contamination in between, plus dirt and random mars and scratches.
80/20 is pricey and rarely perfect, but they put a lot of effort and cost into protecting everything during shipping, with paper separators, heavy shrink wrapping, and thick full-length carboard boxes.
I’ll buy T-slot fasteners from Zoro, but never again will I trust them with actual 6-foot extrusions.
And when I ordered Proto hand tools from them last year, they stuck super-adhesive labels on them, which took more time than I should have invested to clean them off.
They also stuck an impossible-to-remove label over the directions and safety hazardous label of a jar of some kind of chemical I ordered. McMaster or MSC will usually stick a product like than into a bag.
I had too many bad experiences with them over the past few years in general. Maybe it was just a string of bad luck, but there were all kinds of different issues.
A precision device was shipped in a plastic bag and arrived damaged. I spoke to them over the phone. The replacement arrived in the same condition.
I ordered a new model SKU of Mitutoyo instrument, and they sent the wrong old model. They say it must have been a “mispick” but I didn’t trust them to get it right the second time.
I placed another order today – there was an Olfa product they have for less, and say it’ll arrive pretty quickly.
It’ll take a bunch of perfect customer experiences to make up for the past 2 years of mistakes. But for things like T-slot extrusions, I am unlikely to take the chance again.
Johnez
I used to game ebay with watching an item to receive a discount later, unfortunately doesn’t work anymore (for me at least). I didn’t honestly thought Zoro was a fly by night outfit (note to marketers, naming a company something weird is not good practice to get customers to spend hundreds/thousands of dollars lol) and completely ignored them for tools until I found out they’re affiliated with Grainger. Figure I’ll check em out and use the cart trick for some tools now ha. Harbor Freight emails are thoroughly welcome, especially since I have a decent set of baseline tools I’m now looking to upgrade as I go. Not being in a hard place with need for tools asap is so nice when they send “35% of ALL Quinn tools”- yayeah time to pick up a few hundred bucks worth of sockets.
S
Counter point: if the awards are just an episode of ‘Who’s Line is it Anyways?”, I want to see who’s first to stop taking the awards announcements less seriously.
“Our Leaf Blower Ranked Worst Ever in Squirrel Life Weekly!”
Or “Cave Man Quarterly ranked our new and more powerful Drill as the best hammer they’ve ever tested!”
Ben
I’d subscribe to Cave Man Quarterly. “New DuWunga Cordless Rock Make Bonk Kunga Harder.”
Mike+I
Years ago, the Zoro coupons were great as they applied to almost everything. They were my go to for all tool type purchases.
These days, I can not recall when I last ordered from Zoro. Their shipping fees are higher than most and their coupons have so many exclusions that they are worthless. 30% off any item ….. great, oh, wait …. excludes all products containing a vowel in their name.
Yep
The email spam is one reason I moved to compartmentalized anonymizer email services (called email aliasing). I won’t name drop any here but there are a dozen or so mainstream ones. Get one with a strong privacy policy or self-host your own. All emails sent to an alias collect in your actual email transparently. Some services allow responding back through the alias if needed.
Why do this? Instead of giving out your main email address to every company and having them resell it to every ad agency on the planet, you create individual email addresses per business/service/organization. For instance, I created an email inbox specifically for Toolguyd here. That email, if it gets sold, traded, leaked from a database, etc. and I start getting spam from other businesses besides the one I created it for, I simply turn the alias off and all emails sent to it will bounce back to the sender as undeliverable.
I don’t need to worry about draconian email unsubscribe policies, hidden links, or broken links.
As an addition to this, my disposable Home Depot email gets sold off by HD every 6 months or so. I start getting messages to my HD address from dozens of unrelated businesses. I go to my dashboard, turn the alias off, generate a new alias, and sign into HD to change it.
This approach has cut my received spam down from the hundreds per month down to zero. I recommend implementing this on a brand-new email inbox and weaning people off of your old address.
Stuart
A couple of people do that, or maybe they’re huge fans. The only thing I recommend against is completely fake emails for regulars or anyone that asks a question. It sucks to provide a long answer via private email only to have it bounce back because the email address doesn’t exist.
Companies have asked for readers’ email addresses once or twice, and that’s always going to be a hard NO.
JR Ramos
The state of marketing – in general – and e-commerce these days is just frightful. Seems like it took a big shift about 6-8 years ago and just continued to escalate to the ridiculous point it is now with many companies. Part of it may be a need to be more aggressively competitive in today’s online world with so many choices and exposure to many businesses, but part of it may just be a combination of current marketing approaches that are taught to students and the outsourcing of marketing and promotional contacts to contracted marketing companies. Some of them are just really bad and it’s hard to believe they can continue in the manner that they do.
One that comes to mind is Penn Tool. They really are a great company and industrial supplier, long history, but my gosh their emails have the absolute worst content I have ever seen, as if it’s marketed to DIY kindergarteners rather than the types of businesses and people they actually serve.
Usually falls on deaf ears but in recent years I’ve taken to sending polite critical emails to companies who engage in this kind of nonsense. That got me unsubscribed from a couple that I still wanted to receive content from, but I just resubscribed to them. But it did result in three real conversations with people that maybe took it to heart a little bit.
On the flip side, there are some companies that seem to auto-purge addresses from email lists after a certain amount of time with no subsequent purchase (and/or not “seeing” you open an email with trackers in it). That’s irritating, too.
Lowball click-bait type crap like the “quick question” and all the derivatives…generally gets deleted, if not unsubscribed or blocked. That seems to be experiencing a resurgence lately.
Stuart
Emails cost money to send out. A few months ago I purged zero-open emails* from ToolGuyd’s email list, and started saving around $50 a month.
*I don’t remember exactly, but I think the filter was anyone who didn’t open an email in more than a year, or something like that.
JR Ramos
True…I meant to mention that caveat. I first learned about that via an art museum years ago. An actual person emailed me to ask if I wanted to remain on the list because I hadn’t opened an email in awhile. I opened every one of them, unbeknownst to them. Nice exchange but that was a surprise to me at the time that there was an actual cost to email services….duh, right?