Would this work for your product?

One of our heroes, Seth Godin, recently blogged about a checking the authenticity of medicine in Nigeria, where counterfeit drugs are a massive problem.

The idea is that whenever someone in Nigeria buys some medicine, they scratch off the foil & text the code into the pharmaceutical company, who can then reply and verify it is real.

He pointed out that this might work well as a bit of interaction for any product.

We agree.

For example, if you sell decorators supplies, we think it would be a great idea to have a scratch panel on the lid where you can text the code & get ideas of how to use the product?

Or if you sell plants, why not ask your customer to text in and get ideas for growing that plant?

This achieves 3 things:

1. The people who text in are clearly interested in hearing more from you, and will probably be the 20% of your customers who account for 80% of your sales. You should definitely keep in touch with them.

2. You get the opportunity to send them something to thank them for buying from you.

3. You get the chance to connect a person and a telephone number to your sale. This is a new idea if you sell via wholesalers, and previously un-workable.

Remember, the money is in the list. If you have a list of customers who have bought from you, and have consented to hearing  then you cannot fail to make more money.