Great Examples of Corona Crisis Communication
Several weeks since the outbreak in China, and several days into large scale quarantine policies in Europe, there are many examples of ‘Corona Communication’ emails. Many of these are uninspiring, almost legal declarations of how the sender has taken all measures to protect staff and customers. I’m sure that the PR department has good reasons to send these to all, but they are as meaningless to consumers as the GDPR email wave of several years ago: after you’ve read one, you’ve seen them all.
Marketers can do much better than that, especially if they followed this mini-Course ;-). To inspire you, here are several nice examples of companies that did connect their brand purpose with adding value in times of crisis, and with that made a good effort in strengthening their customer relationships and customer experience.
Seats 2 Meet example
First, we’d like to show an example from Seats2meet, a co-working location hub. Their email to registered customers has it all: it’s informative, it’s practical and offers relevant tips beyond their own products, it has some modest humor, calls for engagement (to create even more branded interaction) and it’s personal. If they would have more information about customers, it’s sure they would also personalize. It’ll interesting if they will start to collect such data to improve this approach further.
SPORT2000 example
VEMT client SPORT2000 did a great job with a perfectly relevant email (in Dutch) for the situation of many people (suddenly) working from home and with gyms closed for a probably longer period.
The email is visually attractive, contains reassuring information, and inspires and activates. The available data could have been used a bit more to personalize more extensively, but the situational relevance of their products is there from day 1 and is nicely used in content and presentation. A nice extra – beyond their product line – is the spotify playlist customers can play during workouts.
LinkedIn example
LinkedIn sent out a visually toned down email, but content wise they didn’t do a bad job. The mail is personalized with name and picture…. which is a good start, although LI could have used much more personal information to create a higher relevance. We all know they do have this information.
They provide optimal situational relevance with their wide range of products, making use of the good opportunity to present that range to those that might not be aware of them, even though they are current users. Less so than the above example they show creativity and helpfulness beyond their products; they could definitely improve a bit here, but it’s much better than the majority of the broadcasted mails in the past few days.
