Usable Clicks

Seamless Web’s Not So Web Promotion

Seamless Web's Free Coffee Promotion

Outside of a few twitters and IMs I, Surprisingly, didn’t see much chatter about the the latest promotional campaign by Seamless Web. For those of you who are lucky enough to live in a area covered by the online food delivery service, you know them by their off-beat emails and promotional efforts as well as being a very addictive step in the evolution of an even lazier form of food delivery.

When companies that typically do business off the web do something clever online the effort never fails to get coverage across a number of sites. This isn’t to say that all executions are smart or make sense, as much as I am an evangelist for online media – it will probably never make sense for Quaker Oats to build a social network or setup a facebook fan page (there is a chance it already has one). It seems that it would only be fair that there should be similar coverage for the inverse situation (online company doing something clever offline). Although there is a number of cases that get press, mostly godaddy superbowl ads and the occasional search cross promotion, we don’t get too many examples as the cost difference of media/production and lack of hard analytics keeps most online companies away.

To be honest, I don’t fully get the free coffee promotion. At its heart, Seamless Web is a company that makes money when customers don’t want to go out to eat. So instead of encouraging that behavior and showcasing the ease and benefit of their service they are sending people off of their couches and into the real world, where there is no web transaction and they actually have to speak their order. I can hear it across New York “Hey, I didn’t know this coffee shop was so close to my office, I can go on my way into work.”

At the sake of continuing to be overly dramatic, I should point out that they included a web-only coupon for 5 dollars off your “first personal order.” This was clearly an afterthought and sits tucked away in a sidebar on the free coffee information page.

The free coffee promotion succeeds in the way of being a fun and creative marketing campaign, but will fail in actually bringing a meaningful amount of people into using the product. Don’t get me wrong, I love a free cup of hot coffee but why not something else? Like, sushi week. During sushi week all orders could come with a free tuna roll or really any item that has a low cost and high perceived value. Not only would the response be big but people would actually be creating accounts and learning about the service.

Full disclosure: I will definitely be getting some free coffee on Seemless Web.