Buyers Stopped Calling, More Buyers Than Ever.

I got the following email today: 

Dear Customer,

This is the reminder note to let you know that your order at <company> is almost two years old.

Your order Reference I.D.# 100-9113361 will be automatically deleted in 10 business days. We want to let you know in case you plan to re-order a product with this design:

If you would like to re-order now you can save 20% on your purchase. Click here or copy and paste the link at the bottom of this email.

Until I saw the image, I thought the email was spam. Then, I remembered that we actually used these sheets for notes when buyers would call on listings. Buyers seldom call anymore, though. There is far less a need to handwrite notes on their preferences and criteria. Bad news? 

Not really. Buyers are emailing and filling out online forms with their data now. We no longer take dictation because the information is now online in the data the prospective buyers submit. Some of it is sparse, to be sure, but who didn’t get phone calls that were just as close to the vest? It wasn’t too long ago I was living off of post-it notes and carbon paper messages.  

Clearly, the business has changed. That is good on a variety of levels. When it is online, the data is hard to lose under the car seat. It uses less paper. We can simply forward it to the company agent we refer to. We use a Gmail platform, so organizing and tracking the inquiries distributed to the agents is streamlined.

Everybody wins. Well, everybody except the printer.