Let me start this segment off by saying that I love my job, I love the company I work for and I love the people I work with. I get to work from home all the time, even if there's not a pandemic going on. Just a bit of background, I worked there for about 8 years back when we lived in Ohio. We got bought out by another company and most of our executives left the company. A few years after that, they started back up again as the new company. When I got my current job, it was like I didn’t even skip a beat. It felt like home.
About a week before the states started shutting businesses down and having us quarantine, our marketing director left the company. I’m still not exactly sure why this happened. She had just started working there about 3 months prior to her departure. I really liked her, really liked working with her, and was devastated by her departure. She was straight forward, kind and knew what she was doing. We worked well together.
Then the shut down and quarantine started. We were deemed an essential business and we started scrambling to react to the virus on March 10th. It was like an avalanche of work that just didn’t stop. We threw together new services in a flash based on customer needs and what we thought we could do to help. I created marketing material as fast as I could with very little guidance. I put together email campaigns for both our consumer customers and our Employee Purchase Program customer and project managed that process to keep all departments involved on track. It was a ton of work, but well worth it.
First up on the project list was the new equipment rental program. We’ve never done anything like this before, so I had to create the marketing collateral to promote this service. The service consisted of renting bundles of computer equipment for 6 – 12 months to work from home. After the end user was done with it, they shipped it back to us. After the marketing collateral was created, we added it to the email marketing that we normally send out. I don’t know if anyone ever did rent any devices from us. But they sure did purchase equipment!
We started an email marketing campaign like never before. 6 emails were to be created and sent over the next few weeks. The devices were to be tailored to the messages of Boredom Buster, Work from Home, Setup your Home Office, Boredom Busters again and then a last chance to get your device before the sale ends. At that time, we were also sending separate emails to our customer who had an Employee Purchase Program. That program has a bit of different messaging and each email had to be tailored to each individual customer. I had to create all the consumer emails, along with the Employee Purchase Program emails, along with any other email campaigns anyone threw at me. It was a lot and I had to create a spreadsheet to keep it all straight and keep the project team members involved straight. In the middle of all this email chaos, we brought in a contractor to help with our email campaigns, website, and social media efforts. At first it was a bit challenging to be working with someone new. He was having us do a bunch of things that we’ve never done before. We use HubSpot for all our marketing and client relationship management, and it’s not the most intuitive tool to use. There was a bit of learning curve on what our contractor was having us do. But, thankfully, he likes to make instructional videos to teach the things we needed to learn. Because of everyone’s hard work on the email campaign, we did our best month ever of product sales in March.
I’m sure you remember all the emails you got in March from every company you were associated with telling you what they were doing to help you during the shutdown. We were no exception to this; we had to get out an email to our service customers about how we were responding to virus. Someone sent a template email that I had to wordsmith to tell our customers that we were an essential business, we were still open, and we were here to help. I edited the email quickly and sent it out to the people who had to review and approve it. I didn’t hear back from anyone about the email and I was getting concerned that the time was quickly slipping away. We needed to get this email out. I followed up again and asked if we were ok to send the email. We brought it back to life, had a few meetings on it, and our CEO refined the message. A week later, we finally got the email sent.
While we were creating and refining the coronavirus response email, we were also creating a form for customers to fill out if they needed our help during the shutdown. Forms should be an easy thing to create, but for some reason, I get hung up on them. The fields are hard to manipulate sometimes and they don’t do what we want them to do. We also have to set up a web page to put the form on so people can get to it and use it. Along with the web page, comes a picture and a description of the form. The place where we can obtain pictures is somewhat limited in what we can download. But I did find a picture from another paid site that I thought would be perfect, but it wasn’t. The picture was of a guy’s hand reaching out to the camera and the story that I gleaned from it was that he was reaching out for help. Not everyone saw it that way. They saw it as an unwashed hand with the virus all over it. Ok, fair enough, I guess you can see it that way. The picture that was chosen was a group of business people all standing in a row with smiles are their faces looking a bit like they were in the customer service department. My first thought when I saw this was, they were not 6 feet apart and not practicing good social distancing. But the decision stood on this picture and that’s the one we used. No one filled out the form during the quarantine, but at least we tried to help.
And then came Earth day. This is where I deemed the coronavirus as “This Damn Virus”. I use OneNote to organize my work. It was tough to keep everything I was working on straight. I created a page in my notebook called “This Damn Virus” and put anything virus related in it. About two weeks prior to Earth Day we talked about running a product sales discount on everything in the shop. That sort of got pushed to the back burner after a lot of back and forth about the special. A few days before Earth Day, I asked the question about if we were going to send an email about it or not. I didn’t want to wait until the last minute to ask the question because I didn’t want to be scrambling around getting something together the day before Earth Day. After some more back and forth, it was decided that we were going to do an email, but not promote any products. It would just be a feel-good kind of email. We were still designing, brainstorming, and coming up with messaging for this email the day before Earth day. Since we weren’t done with it at the time I usually log off, I had to stay and work. I hopped on a call that lasted about an hour, and then I worked on the changes to the email from that call. After I did the changes and sent them, I let everyone know I was logging off for the night. I did so and went running. As I was running, I got a text from my boss asking if I could hop online again, there were more changes to the email. I said I could, but I was going to finish running then eat dinner. After dinner, I logged on again and we went back and forth on more changes to this email. Around 9 PM I was still working on it and my boss was texting me to go to bed, we’ll finish it in the morning. So I did. That was long day.
Another project I was on during the quarantine was a really good one to help Columbus City School kids get a low-cost laptop for schooling from home. It’s a great program, but another one that we stood up in 2 days. This program was unique because this was the first time in company history that we called upon the public to help with our mission. The program was to have people donate their used, but still working laptop or tablet to our company. We would wipe the data and upgrade the operating system, then put it up for sale on a special shop site so that any kid from the Columbus City School district could buy a laptop at low-cost price. What a great project! We had to scramble to get two forms and two web page created for this effort, because the president of the company was going on a radio show to promote this program two days after she started the ball rolling on the project. And again, we scrambled around to get all the forms and all the web pages, photos and all created before the deadline. We were able to get everything launched and the radio show aired. We didn’t get a whole lot of response from the radio show promotion, but we were able to pull some of our inventory into the special shop site so kids can purchase them. This past week, we launched an email and social media campaign for the first time to get the kids interested in buying these laptops. The day we launched the social posts was the first day we got a sale. We’re hopeful that sales will continue until school starts. If it even starts.
March through June was tough at work. I felt like it would never end. All I did all day long was virus related stuff. Then I would hear about it all night. Then I would look at my social medias and see everyone posting about it. And I was making masks and shipping them, which was like having another part time job. It was all consuming; I couldn’t get away from it. It was heavy at times, not getting away from it. I will say though, I am in no way complaining about work. I’m grateful that I still had a job throughout this time and am grateful that I still have it now.
Thanks for reading this segment of my “This Damn Virus” story. Catch up on past segments here and come back next Wednesday for the next one!
Comments