Imagine
I just watched the first episode of “Foundation” on Apple TV. I get an AMP-enabled email asking me a couple of questions about what happened – with an atomic reward for answering the Qs.
The full-page ad from Samsung about their new foldable phone has a QR code which promises me a discount if I watch a 2-minute video showing all its great features.
Indigo connects all my past travels and offers me faster onboarding or the extra legroom seats without me even asking for it – because I am their Best customer.
Amazon offers me free use of their new Kindle for a week with 10 of my new books preloaded. Can they trust me to return if I don’t buy? They have 10+ years of my shopping history – isn’t that enough to build trust?
My iPad’s Safari knows my morning routine. I browse the same 10 sites. Can it open up a new window and have those sites pre-opened?
Swiggy’s app has a “Jain food” mode – they know me by now!
Tata Sky calls me and asks me why I did not renew my subscription after having been a customer for 10 years.
My bank stops sending me all those loan offerings – they finally realise seeing my bank balance that I do not need any money from them.
Business Standard copies the beautifully crafted “FirstFT” email so that I actually open and read it.
SonyLiv realises I have been watching all those Poirot and Marple episodes and hides the ones I have watched so I can easily find the ones I still need to watch.
Ajio realises that it was my wife who had used my email ID while ordering a couple years ago and stops sending me all the “women dresses” offers.
Flipkart offers me an incentive to click through to their page to see the personalised offers they have curated for me as part of their Big Billion Days sale.
Internet Chess Club stops sending me emails after realising that I have not clicked on their emails for ten years.
Kitab Khana emails me an excerpt from a new book that just got published.
Quattro asks me for my mobile number as soon as I enter and if I am alone, checks if I want to repeat the same quesadilla I always eat when I dine by myself.
Pepsodent’s toothpaste has a QR code that offers me a 10-day series of Ems (short emails) on dental care.
Croma starts sending me emails with info on new gadgets. (They only send me invoices after purchase and the last time I bought something was in April 2019.)
HDFC Bank credit card division sends me a nice consolidated email of all my expenses in the past quarter – nicely categorised by brand and vertical, tells me my outstanding points, and makes redemption trivial.
Indian Express personalises their home page knowing that I only generally read the headlines and op-eds.
Penguin has a QR code on their books with an incentive for me to answer three questions about my interests so they can build a hotline to me and keep me updated on new books in those categories. (If the book is part of a series, they can let me know when the next one releases.)
Gmail realises its “primary inbox” status is under threat from WhatsApp and offers micro-rewards for opening brand emails.
**
None of the above happens today. Every one of the suggestions is possible today. Don’t you wish brands actually did them? And if they did, would you not (in some of the cases) actually engage more with those brands and spend more with them?
For brands, it is in these ideas that lie the secrets of scaling up their businesses and creating exponential forever profitable growth in the coming Martech era.
