This is the story of a bad breakup between me and an app called “Lift”, which I used to be in love with. Lift is a simple-to-use, motivational mobile app where you enter personal goals of things you want to accomplish. It tracks how often each day you achieve various goals and, with regular success, those personal goals eventually become habits.
For example, a goal could be ‘losing weight’ or ‘floss everyday’ or ‘learn Chinese’. Each day you work on that goal, you simply swipe your finger across the word on your list to check it off. At the end of the week, you are emailed a nice weekly summary so you can see your progress towards your goals.
I loved this app. It kept me focused and moving towards those personal goals that are most important to me. Many a morning I would wake up, peruse my list and challenge myself to see just how many items I could cross off my list that day.
That was then.
Before the email that led to my break-up with Lift.
One sunny morning, Erin Frey, Community Lead at Lift, sent me this email:
This crosses that very real line between being helpful to your customers … and creepy. I had just added this ‘saving money’ task to my list as the holidays approach. I’m one of those who gets the discount coupon in the mail, cuts it out, and then either forgets when I’m at the register or I carry it around for a month in my purse after the expiration date. Regardless, this was weird and felt very invasive. Someone is monitoring if I’m saving money?
So, I immediately replied to Erin at Lift and told her I thought this was creepy and added that I would now stop using Lift.
And this was her reply:
I don’t really enjoy feeling as though someone is watching or monitoring my personal habits. They are private goals I set for myself. If I wanted my personal goals public, I’d post them on a social sharing site. I did not realize that using Lift, a mobile app, was public and that others were monitoring looking for a way to profit from personal self-improvement to-do list. That just feels icky, doesn’t it?
Especially when Lift never made me, an ex-loyal user, did not ask my permission to solicit me, nor did they make it known they would be ‘watching’ my activity and soliciting me from time-to-time.
That’s why I sadly need to breakup with Lift. They lost a user, but more importantly, a loyal fan.
So please take this lesson to heart. While it is exciting to be in marketing in this digital age with all the information we access, (and believe me, I love me some analytics), there is a line between you and your customer. Cross it, and you’ve got a very public breakup on your hands. Respect it, and you have a brand fan for life. Let’s all try to keep that in mind.
~Amy
PS: Chelsea experienced a very successful and positive use of this type of über-tailored marketing when she received an email from Pinterest notifying her that a coffee table she recently pinned had dropped in price. This doesn’t have the same feeling, because a planned consumer purchase is much different than ‘calling out’ someone on their private goal. So – the lesson is, think before you creep!
