{"id":442,"date":"2008-02-05T15:32:11","date_gmt":"2008-02-05T19:32:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/2008\/02\/05\/merchantcircle-makes-me-feel\/"},"modified":"2009-03-27T13:13:26","modified_gmt":"2009-03-27T17:13:26","slug":"merchantcircle-makes-me-feel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/2008\/02\/05\/merchantcircle-makes-me-feel\/","title":{"rendered":"MerchantCircle makes me feel&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Last week I received an automated email from Yahoo Local <a href=\"http:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/2008\/01\/30\/yahoo-local-makes-me-feel-good\/\">that hit the target for automated communications<\/a>. It sent me relevant information in a timely fashion about something that I cared about. I was impressed. I had encouraged Google to follow a similar path. But alas not all surveys work equally well.<\/p>\n<p>MerchantCircle must have been reading my blog as they also sent along a request to fill out a survey. While the email and survey were an improvement over MerchantCircle&#8217;s previous bait and switch (see <a href=\"http:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/2007\/12\/06\/merchantcirclefud-marketing-and-these-guys-get-10-mil\/\">here<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.smallbusinesssem.com\/strange-goings-on-with-merchant-circle\/236\/\">here<\/a>) promotional efforts the survey still didn&#8217;t quite make the grade. <img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/02\/email.jpg\" alt=\"email.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p>The survey questions all seemed pointed to MerchantCircle wanting to know how good of a prospect I was rather than what information I might provide to actually improve their service:<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/02\/survey.jpg\" alt=\"survey.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p>MerchantCircle has a history of less than stellar promotions. This one, like all of theirs, came unsolicited and filled no particular need of mine. It seemed like they were more interested in my money than in my opinion. Again, another lesson to be learned. They are getting better, but still a ways to go.<\/p>\n<p>I can only imagine what their sales promotion manager is like. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.blumenthals.com\/yahoo%20survey\/merchantcircle.html\">Here is the full survey<\/a> if you would like to look at all of the questions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last week I received an automated email from Yahoo Local that hit the target for automated communications. It sent me relevant information in a timely fashion about something that I cared about. I was impressed. I had encouraged Google to follow a similar path. But alas not all surveys work equally well. MerchantCircle must have &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":262,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=442"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2873,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442\/revisions\/2873"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}