Who let you people in here!?

This is in reply to a blog post by Judy Dunn at Cat’s Eye Marketing regarding the folly of spam as a marketing tool for small business – or most businesses for that matter. You won’t find any controversy between us though; I agree with her. I’m just building on her position.

Spam in sheep’s clothing is still spam.

Many many small businesses and micro-businesses are naively or knowingly generators of uninvited and unwelcome e-marketing and e-sales “content”. Lured by the extremely low cost of email marketing, these stressed out, downsized (and desperate?) businesses assume that more is better! “Send our message, pitch, special-of-the-week or news out to anyone and everyone!”

This buck shot approach is not only annoying to the recipients, but is also a careless approach to relationship building. The senders are playing a transparent numbers game, one that counts on a response rate upwards of 3 percent, but one that gambles with, and usually squanders, a potential dialog. Odds are that any future conversation has been forfeited once the reader dispatches these intrusions to Hades’ basement.

But wait you ask, what exactly are you labeling spam?

And how’s an novice e-marketer supposed to know who treats what as spam. Isn’t this all a rather subjective greased pig? I began my previous paragraph naming “uninvited” and “unwelcome” as traits you don’t want associated with your emails. Think of emails you’ve received that prompted “I didn’t ask for this” or “I could care less about this” or simply “*&#@‡‹> SPAM!”

But it gets worse.

It’s bad enough when spammers are from some towering corporate giant, or from a zip code in another time zone, or worse – anonymous, hunkered down in their clandestine spam factories somewhere east of Warsaw. It’s quite another thing receiving junk from people who are members of a local organization you belong to! My local chamber of commerce is perhaps the biggest and most successful in Northern NJ. And they hold appropriately frequent networking – and other – events, etc. etc. They really do a great job. But apparently the easy-to-access list of member businesses on the web site is just too tempting for the business-lead deprived. I’m getting more and more unsolicited e-newsletters, brimming with paragraph after paragraph of technically specific information. Estate planning, hiring, accounting, co-location, office relocation, yoga, chiropractic, cross-country moving specials, reverse mortgages and promotional products, to name a few. Some lead-off with “Dear Fellow Chamber Member” (or words to that effect); others don’t.

What most all have in common is a lack of manners coupled with an assumption that I’m intensely interested in their business (perhaps I should add uninteresting to my spam definition?). I even gave these fellow chamber members the benefit of the doubt, and checked if I had accepted a business card from them at some meeting (which is still no license to spam me). Nope. They just found me on the chamber site’s listing and mailed away.

I’m not a good prospect… but you should know that.

:: The Mark ::

My graphic design business is a one-man shop, perched in a home office above my garage. Not to disparage my setup by any means – it’s downright enviable – but I’m small time. I don’t have a lot of business overhead. Point is, if a marketer took a moment to a) research me or b) engage me in a simple conversation before talking at me, he/she would not have alienated me with uninvited and unwelcome (and uninteresting) “news.” One recent “Introduction Message” email worked very hard through its copywriting to talk to [at] me about the economy, followed by, “That is why I have just added your name to my address book. I will be sending you periodic e-briefs…blah blah blah” It then signed off with “Thanks for allowing me to include you in my address book…” GUFFAW! As if! I don’t want to pick on just that one case. Tactics vary. Nearly all fail. And yes, because my first impressions were negative, I’m unlikely to recommend them to anyone else, let alone do business with them… or remain on their mailing list. Spammer please!

Conversely, had they sent me an invitation to converse, with the stated or unstated goal of “training” me to recommend them (and ideally, encouraging me to do the same) I’d have formed a whole different impression, which would have paid off for them in the long run. I’ll admit that approach takes some work, certainly involving more effort than carpet-bombing the regional business community with newsletters. But that’s where a strategy of engagement trounces mindless tactics. I suggest you resolve to do better with your mailing list. If you scoff at doing a few minutes’ research for each lead, at least work with a writer and romance your leads a bit! Talk to us like human beings and not at us like compliant little pieces of data.

Rant over. Perhaps next time I’ll highlight relationship strategies that I think worked.

Update, July 2nd:

I’m considering updating this post when I’m struck by exquisite examples of mindless spam from my local chamber of commerce or other networking colleagues.

In today’s example, I get two identical emails, one minute apart, from the same local business. That alone is plenty irksome, but the subject read, “something interesting from XYZ LLC” [name substituted of course]. Fine. I open it to read “Happy 4th of July” in red text. That’s it! Oh, except for the closing, “Thank you for being part of my day,” followed by the eight-line signature, followed by the 80-word confidentiality notice, finished off with the microsoft.com text advertisement at very bottom.

I’ve never had a meaningful conversation with this business, certainly nothing more than a brief introduction. This seemingly harmless holiday wish implies that we have a relationship beyond me receiving their sporadic emails, but trust me we don’t. The worst offense though has to be the teaser subject, “something interesting…” First of all, I’ll be the judge of how interesting any of your emails are; and secondly it’s classic bait-and-switch – much better to wish me a happy 4th in the subject, and let it go at that. Time for me to get off the soapbox now and start up some meaningful conversations with my colleagues about appropriate uses of email.