Its not what you do, it's what you do after that [5/29/09]

what's up guys it's Gary vaynerchuk uh had something that happened in my own business life that I thought I could share with you guys because I think it's really a great example of what can be done in today's world of technology and it's really a basic business principle um but I think it really has a lot of uh a lot of Merit you know I always hear people like should we do this should we do that they're crippled by their indecisiveness and their worries about total reaction um it's not what you do it's how you follow up on that mistake it's not how you spill the milk it's how you clean it up that's really what's important in business um the other day I've got my book crush it coming out M let's link that up uh and I'm excited about it and I'm trying to find different creative ways to um you know move the books and get it into people's hands and trying to do creative things here at Wine Library the retail side of things so we tried something new and I was worried about I knew there was a little half you know like is this going to work out kind of thing with it um we sent out an email to our uh our entire email service saying if you buy three books uh and uh a mix of these five wines two cases if you buy that total package two cases and three books send in the two receipts one from Amazon one from wine library. com we'll send you back a free shipping code for the entire month of June and we came up with that based on the uh you know average shipping cost per customer for the month of June and I realized there was an angle where they could actually buy these wines and books in essence for free sounds good right but I also knew like you know it's being kind of aggressive we sent it out and we got five to seven out of hundreds of thousands of people on the list five to seven emails saying this is bull crap why don't you make me stand on my head you guys are a jerk you know all these different things that you know what I totally understood and I knew had the ability to uh happen um six or seven out of a half a million email addresses is not a big percentage but knowing and this is where the key comes in knowing there's a lot of Silent voices Brands there's a few vocal people multiply them by a couple of hundred for everyone 500 a thousand people are thinking the same thing or by percentage of your list so whatever anyway we reacted quickly the next day got those emails I went to the order Department said if anything happens we're going this email today let me know sure up they forwarded me one person called as well and I decided that the next day um what we were going to do and what we did was we sent out an email to everybody on our mailing list for a free shipping code for the month of Jan of June no strings attached six 7,000 emails later today people Thanking us tons of people saying screw them Gary you're a businessman you could do whatever you want but at the end of the day thousands of people that said yeah you know that was kind of off you know the radar kind of new for you guys I was a little taken aack um you know a huge coup for our brand our customers are happy my controller and CFO is not happy because we're taking a beating we don't run on the margins like wine. com or Amazon do that we can have those kind of you know prime or monthly fees you know buy for 50 bucks free shipping for the year where we're low margin business so we're taking a beating but your brand and your relationship with your customer should never take a beating no matter how shortterm the F Financial loss is so just a couple things out there you know Gawker did something with True Blood the other day and everybody's asking is that right I don't want to build creativity if we're all going to be scared to do something confined and no Creative Marketing and business ideas will grow understand this try things don't abuse or disrespect your base you know that's definitely not a good move but do understand that if you missed it by a little Mark and that's still painful how you fix it really can become the reputation and the legacy of that program stop not trying to do cool stuff push that envelope and when you push it too far clean it up because the way you clean it up is what's always remembered