Waste of Bandwidth e-mail marketing

It doesn’t happen all the time, but occasionally someone who has read one of my blogs - or somehow discovered me somewhere out there - contacts me to request a meeting for some reason or another. I’ve had people who want to talk to me about potential project work, about job searches, about my reviewing their books, etc. Yea! I love these meetings. Even though I don’t know these folks quite yet, they’ve figured something out about me. They know I’m a marketer. That I can think. That I can write. That we have something to talk about.

But I also seem to be getting more and more faux invitations, like the one from a sales person at an IT Outsourcing outfit, who wants “check my availability for a meeting with our VP Sales….who is tentatively scheduled to be in New York” in late August.

Most of the e-mail is a description of their company’s services - and it’s actually not that bad a description.

Over long, perhaps, but it did communicate pretty clearly what they do, who they do it for, and the value they provide to their clients. So I give them some props for that.

But what, pray tell, prompted this sales guy to contact me?

He tells me that “this email has been created specifically for you by visiting your web site, and has been sent individually.”

Well, the “Dear Maureen” and the fact that it was not a bcc with a billion other names presumably on it clued me in that it was “sent individually”.

But, whether this was sent through some automated e-mail address mining program, or by some rep who’d deluded himself into thinking that Communigration is a candidate for IT Outsourcing, this is a complete waste of time (yours, mine, anyone’s) and bandwidth just to send the darned thing - and have me write back to have my name taken off the list. The sender made this gracious statement: “We regret any inconvenience caused. If this email bothers you, kindly let us know and we will ensure that we do not contact you again using such emails.”

But not before asking whether I “could spare some time for an introductory teleconference call with [the company's sales VP] prior to meeting to expand on this introduction He would use the telecon to introduce our company / services and this can also mutually help us in freezing the agenda for the meeting.”

Well, I can freeze that agenda without sitting through that introductory telecon, alright.

There is not one shred of anything on the Communigration web site that would suggest that we were candidates for this company’s services.

This is a case of what my friend and colleague Sean Branagan calls “activity vs. action”.

The sender gets to say, “Oh, I sent 1,000 e-mails out to prospects”.

But if I’ve said it once, I’ve said it again, you’re always better off narrowing the top of your funnel by solid targeting, not widening it to let more and more non-qualified names wash through.

In any case, I have dropped out of this particular funnel, asking myself how a company smart enough to write what is a very good introductory e-mail - if directed to the right person - could be dumb enough to send it to me.

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