Conversational foreplay

How do you approach the first contact with a potential customer or prospect? Do you just jump right in and start making your pitch or do you actually take the time to introduce yourself and your company?
Most good sales reps spend a little time socializing with prospects before they launch into the sales process, particularly when they are cold calling the target. This courtesy doesn’t seem to apply when cold emailing a prospect, though.
I can only imagine how Al might have reacted differently if Douglas Karr had sent a personal contact and introduced himself instead of sending out bulk mail. I know for a fact I would have reacted very differently to the email sent to my LinkedIn account address had it been even vaguely personalized and interested in me.
We even have ESPs getting into the sending cold email game. A reasonably well know ESP added me to their mailing list and sent me an advertisement for a free service they’re providing at Marketing Sherpa this year. I was grumbling about spam to a group of friends, one of whom happens to be their delivery guy. He asked for a copy and spent time chasing down how they got the address.
Evidently I sent mail to the privacy manager who left the company over 2 years ago. That puts me in the “prospect” database. Well, OK, maybe. But there are some many better ways to reactivate a prospect than just adding me to their newsletter. Would it really have taken so much work to send me a personal note from the sales person? It doesn’t have to be very long, just introducing the sales person and telling me they’d seen my inquiry about product and asking if they could talk to me about their offerings.
Had this ESP spent a little time to cultivate me, my response would have been totally different. I could have referred customers to them and given them the name of the sales person that was so helpful and respectful of me and my time. That’s not what they did. In a fit of insouciance they just grabbed a 2+ year old email address and added it to their mailing list. They didn’t bother to tell me why or introduce it to me gently.
Seriously, folks, email is about relationships. Adding someone to a mailing list without their knowledge or permission is a really, really bad way to start a relationship. Show a little respect to your prospects. Send welcome messages, even an automated one, before adding just discovered prospect addresses to mailing lists.

Related Posts

Subscription practices in the wild

It’s always interesting to look at what other email marketers are doing and how closely their practices align with what I am recommending to clients.
Today’s example is a welcome message I received from Marriott. During my recent trip to visit a client, I gave Marriott my email address. They sent me a welcome message, primarily text that looked good even with images turned off. The text of the email told me why I was receiving the email and what I could expect.

Read More

Spam isn't a best practice

I’m hearing a lot of claims about best practices recently and I’m wondering what people really mean by the term. All too often people tell me that they comply with “all best practices” followed by a list of things they do that are clearly not best practices.
Some of those folks are clients or sales prospects but some of them are actually industry colleagues that have customers sending spam. In either case, I’ve been thinking a lot about best practices and what we all mean when we talk about best practices. In conversing with various people it’s clear that the term doesn’t mean what the speakers think it means.
For me, best practice means sending mail in a way that create happy and engaged recipients. There are a lot of details wrapped up in there, but all implementation choices stem from the answer to the question “what will make our customers happy.” But a lot of marketers, email and otherwise, don’t focus on what makes their recipients or targets happy.
In fact, for many people I talk to when they say “best practice” what they really mean is “send as much mail as recipients will tolerate.” This isn’t that surprising, the advertising and marketing industries survive by pushing things as far as the target will tolerate (emphasis added).

Read More

Senders need to take responsibility

Having just returned home from another conference, my head is full of new ideas, new thoughts and new projects. I enjoy seeing old friends, making new contacts and sharing ideas. One thing I don’t enjoy, though, is listening to senders and marketers complaining about how hard it is to be a sender because the ISPs will not tell them what standards they need to meet.
If the ISPs would just tell us what they want us to do, we’ll do it.

The ISPs have told senders what they want them to do. They want senders to stop sending mail that their users don’t want. It is a very simple statement.
Stop sending spam.

For many senders, however, it’s not enough. “Tell us exactly what we need to do to stop sending spam. What complaint rates must we be under? What bounce rates do we have to be under? How do you want us to do this?” By this point in the conversation the ISP person is mentally rolling their eyes and looking for a way to escape the conversation.
The ISPs don’t want to tell senders how to behave, they want senders to start behaving. Stop sending spam should be all they need to tell senders.
Senders who ask for ISPs to tell them how to stop sending mail recipients think is spam are looking for specific thresholds they can stay under. They’re not really interested in actually sending wanted mail, they’re interested in sending good-enough mail, where good-enough mail is simply mail that gets to the inbox.
Want to know why ISPs don’t think much of many senders? Because the senders are not visibly taking any stand against abuse. I know there are a lot of senders out there who stop a lot of spam from ever leaving their systems, but there’s also a lot of unwanted mail that goes out, too. Some of that mail is even spam by any definition of the word. All the ISPs can see is the spam that gets through, and then they hear just tell us what to do and we’ll do it. From an ISP perspective, this means the senders only care about the thresholds and getting in under the ISPs’ radars.
Senders need to take more responsibility for the mail that goes out over their networks.
What do I mean by this? I mean senders need to stop waiting for the ISPs to define good practices. Senders need to implement standards and good practices just because they’re good practices, not because the ISPs are dictating the practices. Senders need to stop customers from doing bad things, and dump them if they won’t stop. Senders need to stop relying on ISPs for specific answers to why mail is being blocked. Senders need to take responsibility for the mail going across their networks.
It’s time for senders to grow up and stop relying on others for guidance. They shouldn’t implement good practices just because the ISPs tell them to, but instead should implement good practices because they are good practices.

Read More