Shot in the Dark

Just Like Shakespeare Said; All Them Marketers Oughtta Be Dead

Joe Doakes, once of Como Park, emails:

I get lots of spam emails but never see them.  My spam filter works fine for real spam.  It’s spam-ish emails that get through.  “Legitimate” spam, so to speak.
 
Marketing people will tell you that the best source of business is your existing customer list.  They already know the way to your door. They paid you money in the past. The trick is to get them back in the door again to spend more money in the future.  How to do that?
 
Keep your name in front of them.  Email a quarterly newsletter.  Email monthly specials.  Email “Happy Birthday!” greetings.  That way, when the customer thinks “I should buy . . . ” they already know who to buy it from.
 
Except I HATE SPAM.  Pelting me with spam emails is far more likely to annoy me than to make me grateful.  Do businesses gain more repeat business from spam than they drive away?  I wonder.
 
And it’s everywhere.  The grocery store wants my email before I can get the BOGO on green grapes but that means receiving weekly coupon emails.  The oil change place wants to send me a three-month reminder in addition to holiday greetings. The dentist, health care provider, insurance agent, Congresscritter, drugstore, discount warehouse . . . STOP SENDING ME THIS CRAP!
 
But I can’t tell them that, or they will take my name off the list, and the next time I shop there, they will say my account has been closed at my request.  
 
Marketing majors take note: it’s people like you what cause civil unrest.  My next “mostly peaceful” protest may be at your office.  And not a soul would blame me.
 
Joe Doakes
 

Point taken – although I’m going after the people (or “people”) that design phone trees first. 

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3 responses to “Just Like Shakespeare Said; All Them Marketers Oughtta Be Dead”

  1. jdm Avatar
    jdm

    Oh, Mr Doakes, you’re so yesterday. Now, they want you to download their app to get those deals. Total Wine tried to pull this last time I went there.

  2. SmithStCrx Avatar
    SmithStCrx

    I worked in “Sales” for a building supply retailer when they started to make the jump into having an online presence and using digital tools. So much of what we did was dictated by 30+ year old ideas that had been out of date for 20 years, but you couldn’t convince the owner. The rest was the brain child of 20 something tech experts (at least in their old mind).

    In the “old” days of the turn of the century, if you ordered a special order item, the computer would generate a post card notification the next day and one of the various managers would mail them out. At less than 25 cents per order, it was negligible compared to products price tag, but when stores would be mailing tens to hundreds a day across hundreds of stores, that cost adds up.

    The future arrived in 2006, and it brought the cost saving email notification. Don’t want an email, then you’ll have to call us to check on your order. Give us your email, and it’s different problems.

    As an employee, my issue was the time-line. Emails were dispatched as soon as the trailer was acknowledged. It wasn’t uncommon for people to come to pick up their order before we’d unloaded the trailer!

    As a customer, the problem was spam. Not only would we send you an email when your order arrived, we’d send you 3 emails a day with various prompts to come shopping. The only saving grace is that the spam emails were from a dedicated account, so it was easy to block those emails while still receiving order notifications or quotes from employees.

  3. Bill C Avatar
    Bill C

    SmithStCrx, that was one thing I noticed about your former employer. The other two large building supply companies had individual items listed on their website as a catalog years before yours did. They lost revenue from me because of that.

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