Email Marketing at it's Most Risible

We've been the target of one of the most badly gauged email marketing campaigns I've seen in a long while today. This morning the blog inbox had the following awaiting me in the "spam folder."

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There was a logo for the product and text telling me I'll be a beacon of light. That's nice. What a waste of 10 seconds.

Did it spark my interest? Not really. It sparked my laughter. I forwarded it on to a colleague as an example of some of the amusing spam we get. He laughed. Out of idle curiosity he clicked the link and laughed some more.  Then we got on with our day.

Just now I got a second email from the same company. It turns out they're an email marketing company offering an email marketing product. How do I know? They sent me this:

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A few points on this:

1. The first sentence is grammatically incorrect. This makes me think the company is unprofessional.


2. I don't want to be hassled via email by them, if I were interested I'd phone so now I won't be clicking any more links on their spam emails (I won't even be opening them, TBH).


3. We offer email marketing here at I-COM, which these guys would have seen had they looked at our site and chosen to email targeted leads rather than every email address they could scrape. Good email marketers don't email market to businesses that offer the same services being offered in their e-shot.

The moral? A decent email marketing campaign needs to give you a genuine reason to click and needs to target the people who might actually care - and it shouldn't be so pushy that it encourages those same people to block you.