Marketing is a lot about bringing attention to your product, create interest, and of course, sell it, but it’s also about giving something extra to exceed the expectations. I just had the best experience of that: I bought a pen tip and got a tree in Madagascar. The best extra I have seen for a very long time.
Pen Tips for Apple Pencil
Today I found Pen Tips, a company in the Netherlands who sell silicon pen tips for the Apple Pencil, or more like a silicon skin you put on your Apple Pencil. The idea is to add more friction, which gives you more precision and control when you draw on an iPad. I bought one immediately.
The buying procedure was simple, I picked a green pen tip, paid with Apple Pay, and it was done in just a couple of minutes from when I first found their homepage.
What I didn’t expect was to get an extra email from an organization called Tree-Nation:
Dear Åsa Stenström,
Pen Tips offered you 1 tree(s) as a gift.
Plant your tree and discover the message Pen Tips left on your tree.
A nice surprise from Tree-Nation
This is a small gesture, but it made me very happy. I also like that I had to go to Tree-Nation’s website and ”plant my tree” in Pen Tips’ forest on Madagascar. That extra step was a nice way to make sure I would check out their work.
I had to plant my tree!
An essential part of my customer experience is that Pen Tips didn’t mention anything about giving me a tree until the deal was set. They didn’t use it to sell more. However, since I became so happy and wrote this blog post, I might help them sell more indirectly.
I wish more companies acted as Pen Tips do. On the contrary, I’m more used to companies trying to sell me some stupid extra products when all I want is to buy just one product.
The worst ones force you to go through a series of steps where they continuously promise to tell you more and then ask you to buy this ”extra special deal offered especially for you.” When you finally reach the end of that annoying and frustrating series of steps, you might even regret that you thought of buying their stupid product from the start.
Pen Tips sales procedure works in a totally different way: they sell a very small product for a fair price. There’s nothing else to it from what you can tell from their website. Instead, they add something extra after the order is set: they gave me a tree to plant in their forest in Madagascar.
I was happily surprised because this was so unexpected, thoughtful, and caring. I wish more companies cared for their customers in such a sweet way.
Thank you, Pen Tips! You made me happy.
Here is where I planted my tree!
PS For those of you who want to know what it’s like to use Pen Tips, I will write another blog post when I have received my pen tip and tried it out.