You’ve Got to Be Kidding Me!

by Laura Lake on March 13, 2007

About a month in a half ago I attended the Affil­i­ate Sum­mit con­fer­ence in Las Vegas. It was a pro­duc­tive con­fer­ence filled with many atten­dees. The com­pany I worked for had a booth. We did the meet and greet thing and col­lected many busi­ness cards from poten­tial prospects.

It is now nearly the mid­dle of March and I am still on the receiv­ing end of follow-up emails. Today was no dif­fer­ent except when I received the follow-up email from a mar­ket­ing intel­li­gence com­pany, I cringed. Why?

The email had no salu­ta­tion — it sim­ply stated “Hello,“
The To: field had the senders name not mine.
The end­ing call to action was: “Please get in touch when you can.”

Let me just say:

Dear Email Sender,

You lost me at Hello! You in no way per­son­alilzed your follow-up with me and by the sight of the To: address I know this was a mass email. I’m all about sav­ing time, but not at the stake of los­ing a poten­tial client or busi­ness partner.

Your call to action left me yawn­ing and I won’t be get­ting in touch any time soon, because you lost my inter­est in your poor follow-up.

Please Mr. Mar­ket­ing Intel­li­gence — do a lit­tle research on the tech­niques in tradeshow follow-up and learn the basics. You will find that you will get much greater results by mak­ing me feel spe­cial and in some way help­ing me to remem­ber who you are. Did we dis­cuss some­thing? Would you stand out to me in any way? Did you visit me at my booth or did we have a drink at one of the evening func­tions? Per­haps you were that guy with the red hair and funny hat?

You’ve lost my inter­est and unfor­tu­an­tely you prob­a­bly lost the inter­est of 75% of the other recip­i­ents of this quick designed follow-up email. It truly wasn’t worth what lit­tle time you put into it or the time I took to read it.

Sin­cerely,

L2

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