After the summer I started my internship full of promise and excitement to see what the actual work field was all about. I got an internship at an online shop which sold organically grown house and garden plants. As someone who owns an obscene amount of plants, the idea of working with them was a very big bonus to this internship. The office was only ten minutes from my house and it was a small company ran by two women, my leftist heart was so full. In writing, everything was perfect, but issues came rearing their ugly head soon enough. The marketing manager, the only person working in the online marketing, was my supervisor. A very sweet and smart woman but incredibly chaotic.. As a very tidy person who needs strict guidelines and schedules, we were not a match. After my spending my first two mornings from 08:30 to 13:30 on Tuesday, 08:30 to 12:30 on Wednesday, and every other morning from 08:30 to at least 10:30 by myself without guidance, my patience started to wear thin. After indicating to my supervisor twice that this was not really working for me and not seeing a difference, I decided to quit.
As you may have seen from the title, for me there is no place like home. So after the decision was made to quit, I asked my current employer whether there was an internship I could fill in the company. I had worked at that company for two years on the customer service team by then. Usually they only have one internship place, which was already filled by my study friend / customer service coworker / housemate / best friend. With a few pleading looks and a lot of switching around to find something for me to do, I got the internship at the company I already felt at home at.
The internship
The company I completed my internship at was Zoofy. Zoofy is an online platform where you can book a professional for in and around the house. There is no hassle with quotations, just fill in their online form and Zoofy will try to find someone as soon as possible. I already knew the workings of the platform from having worked on the customer service side for two years. Now with this internship, it was time to learn the workings of the marketing side of the company. I mainly focussed on search engine optimalisation (SEO), building and keeping the website up to date with content so Google would show the platform as the first option when looking for a handyman, plumber, electrician, etc.. Besides the SEO, it was also important for me to use the learnings from my studies during my internship. I worked on the marketing emails to the professionals who work in name of Zoofy and the customer marketing emails. Both of them have different needs from the company to reach them. For the professionals, it was important for me to connect them to the company. We do this by personalising the emails, always using informal language, showing their statistics from the past month (X amount of jobs done & X amount of positive reviews) and asking them for feedback on what kind of discounts they would like to receive from other stores/ platforms. For the consumers, it is more about selling than connecting, we offer discount codes to the services we provide and give information about the other services we offer.
My research
For my research, I did an experiment on the effects of personalisation in the marketing emails to consumers. For this, two emails were created. One email, with personalisation, had their first name in the subject line, in the greeting, it was sent from a company employee (me) and had a saying goodbye greeting with the name of the company employee. The other email, without personalisation, did not have their name in the subject, no greeting with name, sent from the company name and a saying goodbye with the company name. It was tested whether the personalisation email would have more people who opened it, and less people who unsubscribed. The results showed that more people in the personalisation group opened the email, but it also had more ubsubscribers. This could be explained by people being concerned for their online privacy because their personal information (name) was used in the email.
My recommendation to you
No one is as concerned with what you do, as you yourself are. I was terrified to quit the internship that did not suit me. I was worried that if I did, that the company would be angry with me or I wouldn’t be able to complete my internship this semester. At the end, I had a better internship I could have hoped for with people who supported me and my best friend / coworker / house mate / study friend besides me.
Looking for an internship?
If you’re in need of an internship, do consider Zoofy. They have done nothing but make me feel at home and given me the space to find out what the work field is in real life. They have a post about this (or see it in Dutch here) on the website, ignore the dates as it is a bit dated.. I might even see you there, so any and all communication science questions I will hopefully be able to help you with.