The truth matters.

bullhornCall within the next 10 minutes…
Consumers with last names starting with O – Z can call tomorrow…
Only 5 seats left at this price!
 
All of these are common marketing techniques designed to prompt consumers to buy. It’s not a new idea, create a sense of urgency and people are more likely to buy.
I think some marketers are so used to making outrageous claims to support their marketing goals, that it doesn’t occur to them that the truth matters to some people.
There’s almost no better way to get me to send in a spam complaint than to send me an email with a claim about how I opted in.
Example:

You are receiving this e-mail because your e-mail address was registered at Money Net LLC to receive relevant 3rd party communications. If you would like to unsubscribe from receiving 3rd party email communications from this marketer please click the unsubscribe link below.
— Sent from a company that doesn’t do business in the US.

Another example:

I am not spamming. I have studied your website, prepared an audit report and believe I can help with your business promotion. If you still want us to not contact you, you can ignore this email or ask to remove and I will not contact again.
— Sent with a series of followups over a month period.

And another example:

You are receiving this email from Spamming Marketing Company because you have previously shared your email address with us…
— Sent to an email address harvested off LinkedIn.

I’m not even sure the above are good marketing. But they’re certainly untrue. No, I didn’t subscribe to Money Net LLC and as I am not a UK resident, I’m not eligible for your sale. No, you didn’t leave me alone and stop contact. No, I didn’t share my email address with you.
In the email space, typical marketing prose doesn’t always work. People view their email inboxes as a much more personal space than television or even their postal mailbox. Sending emails that contain blatant falsehoods is equivalent to going into their house and lying to their face. It’s bad practice, and it’s bad customer relationships.
In email, everything is about the relationship. Lies don’t make for good relationships.

Related Posts

More on opt-out for B2B marketing

There is still a bit of discussion going on around the HBR article on how B2B mail should be opt-out not opt in on various delivery blogs. Over on the Blue Sky Factory blog new daddy (congratulations!) DJ writes a post about why he thinks opt-out in any context is a poor marketing decision.
One of his commenters follows up with a long comment about how recipients shouldn’t get angry when they get unsolicited email from a company they have interacted with.

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Email saves trees!

The arrival of my first spam email was a bit of a shock. I’d been on the internet for years by that point and had never seen junk mail in my inbox. Of course, the Internet was a very different place. The web was still a toddler. There was no email marketing industry. In fact, there wasn’t much commerce on the web at all. Much of the “surfing” I did was using gopher and ftp rather than the fancy new web browser called NCSA Mosaic. To share pictures we actually had to send printouts by postal mail.
It wasn’t just getting spam that was memorable (oh, great! now my inbox is going to look like my postal box, stuffed full of things I don’t want), it was the domain name: savetrees.com. Built into the domain name was an entire argument defending spam on the grounds of environmental friendliness. By sending spam instead of postal mail we could save the earth. Anyone who didn’t like it was morally corrupt and must hate the planet.
Why do I mention this history? During a discussion on a list for marketers earlier this week, multiple people mentioned that email marketing was clearly and obviously the much more environmentally sound way to do things. I mentioned this over on Facebook and one of my librarian friends (who was one of the people I was email friends with back in those early days) started doing her thing.
She posted her findings over on the Environmental News Bits blog: The comparative environmental impact of email and paper mail. It’s well worth a read, if only because a lot of companies have really looked into the issue in great detail. Much greater detail than I thought was being put into the issue.
I shared one of the links she found, the 2009 McAfee study, with the email marketing group discussing the issue. (You may want to put down the drinks before reading the next line.) It was universally panned as marketing and therefore the conclusions couldn’t be trusted.
Anyone who pays any attention knows that nothing we do and none of the choices we make are environmentally neutral. Plastic bags were supposed to save trees from becoming paper bags, but turned into an environmental mess of their own.
Simple slogans like “email saves trees” might make marketers feel better, and may have gained Cyberpromo a strong customer base in the early days. But the reality is different.

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Spam is about invading other people's space

At the recent Sendgrid Emailmatter’s conference Sally Lehman advised attendees to “Treat someone’s inbox like it was their home.” This is advice I’ve been giving clients for a long time. I think it’s even more relevant now as so many people have data enabled phones and are checking email so frequently. It’s not just their home, it’s their personal space they can take with them.
Seanan McGuire, a friend and NY Times bestselling author, wrote a blog post today about how she views promotion and marketing as an artist and someone who is expected to promote her work. She also talks about what it feels like to be a target of promotion and offers some advice about how to promote your products online.  She talks about how she, as an author and creative type, is expected to do some level of self promotion and how that promotion is done in her space – whether that space be on twitter or her blog.

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