Surprise and Delight Customers with Easter Eggs

If you are looking for a way to surprise and delight your customers (and, really, who isn't?) you might consider adding easter eggs to your product, service or experience. Yes, even your email newsletter. Kathy Sierra has a great piece making the case for Easter Eggs:

A good easter egg is a playful, hidden or disguised feature that, when discovered, can offer surprise, delight, entertainment, humor, novelty, or an "I Rule" experience.

She does however offer a warning:

Until you've nailed the fundamentals--the things users want, need, and expect--don't bother trying to "surprise and delight" users. That just pisses 'em off.

So let's assume that you have the basic nailed. That's a big assumption, I know.

Crafting appropriate Easter Eggs for your marketing communications requires a huge amount of customer intuition. You need to know what will surprise and delight your customers and what they will simply consider lame. Think about going to the movies. If you really love the movie you are willing to wait through the credits to see some bloopers. Especially created bloopers that spoof classic bloopers like Pixar adds to their films. Conversely, if you didn't care for the movie or actively disliked the movie you won't be interested in anything more.

Finally, Kathy has a good list of the characteristics of good Easter Eggs:

They get users involved as a participant rather than a passive spectator.

They get users to spend more time

They're remembered (you can use easter eggs to enhance learning)

They DO NO HARM!

Their discovery is NOT a required part of the experience. If it is, then it's not an easter egg, but simply a part of the product.

They give users the "I Rule" experience of being clever enough to "get it", especially if it's in plain sight, but requires "insider" info to recognize it.

They're entertaining in some way (this is largely the point of making them)

They do NOT need to be funny, although they often are.

At BeTuitive we have an Easter Egg in our own monthly newsletter.

[read]

tags: easter egg | delighting customers | kathy sierra
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