Bad Marketing

The other day I received the following e-mail.

“Good afternoon Les,

Our corporate office recently sent a mailer invite regarding our (product omitted) Promotion to your attention at the Northbrook office. Your business was among 50 local businesses selected. It's very simple: If you allow us to provide a quote on your (service omitted)service for your Northbrook location, we will give you a (product omitted) regardless of whether or not we do business. It would only require 10-15 minutes of your time so that I can gather information needed to run a quote.”

Nothing wrong with the content. Personalized. Nice offer. The only problem is that I have been a customer of this company for years. I responded to the salesperson who sent the e-mail, and told him I considered it poor marketing. I asked him if he knew why. He did not, so I told him I was an existing customer and had been for years. His response:

“(Company) has thousands of customer’s in this area and occasionally we fail to recognize the name of the company and our marketing group that sends out the mailers for us to follow up does not efficiently “scrub” the database for existing customers. For that I apologize.”

Ok. Nice that he apologized. And I can forgive the typo. But come on.

Point #1. “Occasionally we fail to recognize the name of the company.” Do you look at the names manually? For a program like this, which is only sent to 50 customers, maybe you do. But if you only sent this to 50 customers, it would seem a trivial exercise to make sure none of them were customers.

Point #2. “Our marketing group … does not efficiently ‘scrub' the database for existing customers.” This should be automated and there is no excuse for this. There is no other business named L. Stern & Associates in this area. And my e-mail address is unique, and it is the one this company has on file.

So the problems: First this annoyed me (although they are a good service provider so I will not leave them). Second, since this solicitation obviously did not originate from a customer list, they had to pay for my name, so they wasted money sending this to me. Third, and most importantly, it made them look really unprofessional.

Scrubbing technology has been around forever. There was no excuse for this. Bad marketing.