Travelblather

I'm a big fan of Time magazine. It's just right for me... well written, well illustrated weekly news and reviews. I've been a happy subscriber for several years. Each time I get round to a few months before the end of my subscription period the letters start coming. At first they are upbeat! No need to do anything... I'm locked into great rates as a regular subscriber and resubscription will take place automatically as I'm part of the Preferred Subscriber Automatic Renewal Program.
I cancelled this immediately.
Why? Because it's a pile of rubbish. The best deals are offered only to new subscribers. I know this because I called their subscription centre last time I was due to renew and asked why the new deals on offer on the website were better than  those offered to resubscribers. I  expected them to immediately offer me the same deal too. Except they wouldn't. If I wanted that deal I  would have to wait for my current one to end then resubscribe.
In the meantime the letters keep coming. Free Gifts... Different types of paper - yellow for urgent: titled: Tele-Dispatch as if it's some kind of telegram. And finally, once the magazines have stopped coming... A 'Renewal Voucher' offering me a discount as a former subscriber... but 'You Must Act At Once' it reads. This also said that by taking up this offer I would 'get Time delivered FOR LESS (their emphasis) than many new subscribers pay'.
Rubbish. They were still offering me exactly the same deal... every single letter, and I reckon there were at least five of them, offered me a best rate of £0.64 an issue.
Sign up afresh as a new subscriber and you get 81 issues for £34.99 (in fact at one point the website said £29.99 and I don't know which deal I actually got!) But 81 issues at £34.99 is £0.43 an issue about 30% cheaper.
These days we're rewarded for our disloyalty. Shame eh? What is particularly weird is the confirmation email from Time says 'thank you for continuing your subscription'. So clearly they know this kind of thing happens and can track it too. Would love to hear what someone from Time has to say about all this... 

(By the way, if anyone from Time is reading this I don't want the free piece-of-junk watch that only works for 6 months and looks as cheap as it is.)

The company (iCrossing where I now work as travel editor) is at a really interesting crossroads. In the old
days (read 12 months ago - this is the Web) the company's reputation was built on being very good at making
clever tweaks to the technical elements of websites to get them up
the rankings on Google. (Yes folks, that's called SEO - search engine optimisation.) As Google gets smarter - and better able to spot technical tricks to boost your site's position in search rankings - it's clear that
tinkering under the bonnet won't be enough. (I'm not going to get into more dubious practices like link buying in this post.)

Let's face it. It's one
thing to attract people to your website, it's another to keep them
there and get them to make purchases. What a website really needs to do
is give people what they are looking for in an interesting and useful
way.

The web's very strength is also its weakness in some ways... because everything about it is so measureable, it's very easy to obsess about numbers (hits, page rankings, conversions etc). You can easily forget that at the end of the day a website is there for its users... who are real people.

Real people don't always behave in totally rational ways...Just getting them to land on your home page is often not enough to get them to buy.