The Power of Surprise And Delight: A Case Study

Intro from Gary:

One of the things I’m most excited about is “surprise and delight” – it’s something I’ve talked a lot about in my book The Thank You Economy. One of my main objectives with my text platform is to do a LOT more surprise and delight. 

What you see in this article written by my team one of my first efforts:

—  

On September 12th, 2019, Gary sent a text to the Team GaryVee WhatsApp thread with an idea.

One of the things Gary’s trying to do is find new ways to add value to his text messaging community. He had an idea to “surprise and delight” some of the members who signed up. 

After asking a couple of people on the team to help, he posted a tweet asking for florists to send an email. 

A ton of emails came in from florists from all over the place – but to keep things simple, we decided to concentrate on just a few big cities in the US. We started talking to florists who emailed from Boston, Miami, Nashville, and some cities in NY and NJ. 

Huge shoutout to all the florists involved: 

NEW YORK

Bre Designs

Urban Stems

John Paul Learn

Ode à la Rose

NEW JERSEY

Norma’s Flowers

BOSTON

Exotic Flowers

NASHVILLE

Amelia’s Flower Truck

MIAMI

Flower Power Miami

Once we talked to the florists and made some deals, Gary sent a text message to everyone on his community text platform in the above areas. He sent out a link to a form for them to fill out with their addresses. 

We ended up selecting 248 people who filled out the form at random. Then, we sent their names to the florists in the respective areas with a personal note from Gary. 

They all got mailed out the very next day! All 248. 

It was SO fun to see the reactions: 

Some members who received flowers also wrote long articles about the experience on LinkedIn.

Like Gary says, the best marketing strategy is to care! In this digital age that we’re living in, it’s very easy go on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or any other social platform and talk about any experience you had – positive or negative. It makes it easy to “yell” when something goes wrong, but also easy to yell when something goes incredibly well.

Going above and beyond to surprise and delight your customers in a way they wouldn’t expect is a great way to leave that impression and show what your intent really is.

If you found this article interesting, share it on Twitter!