Cold calling by email: how not to do it
Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on June 19, 2007
With people mentally attuned to deleting spam from their inbox, it's important to ensure that any personal emails don't look like spam.
This can be hard to do when writing to someone for the first time, since recognition is your biggest ally in keeping people away from the delete button.
The task is made more complex by the fact that each recipient has their own definition of what counts as unsolicited and unwanted spam. Technically, spam is unsolicited email sent in bulk. But recipients don't think like that. Spam is what they call unwanted email.
All of which leads to much wringing of hands when preparing to cold call someone via email. So I thought I'd use a particularly crass example to point out how not to do it. I give you...the link exchange request that failed...
Here are the cropped screenshots of the email's beginning and end (the rest was equally inappropriate):
Here are the numbered comments:
1. I've never heard of the address listed. It would have been better to make a clear reference to my site in the subject line, so I'd consider it relevant and personal to me.
2. The email address and the site mentioned in the subject line do not match. On top of that, the email address is impersonal. I rarely get one-to-one email from people who call themselves "webhosting."
3. The lady doth protest too much, methinks. A personal email requires no such disclaimer. It merely suggests I'm not the first to get this email, and people think it's spam.
4. Typos and bad English everywhere. Since I have no idea who sent the email, I can't make allowances for those without English as their first language. It just reads badly.
5. This "webmaster" chap. Who is he? If the sender had actually looked at my site, they'd know my name and use it.
6. I have no single "active links page" suggesting, again, nobody actually paid any attention to me or my site.
7. A lovingly impersonal signature.
(Note also that in several countries, this email would be illegal under media/anti-spam/data laws.)
All in all, we have an entirely impersonal email, written badly using a form letter and layout (suggesting a bulk mailout using mailmerge), with irrelevant content and no suggestion that the sender had taken a proper look at the website they want to do business with.
Recipient's conclusion: spam. Net effect of cold call attempt: rejected email, possible spam report potentially followed by blacklisting, bad image for the company concerned.
More on permission | Tags: uce, spam, email solicitiations, bad email
This can be hard to do when writing to someone for the first time, since recognition is your biggest ally in keeping people away from the delete button.
The task is made more complex by the fact that each recipient has their own definition of what counts as unsolicited and unwanted spam. Technically, spam is unsolicited email sent in bulk. But recipients don't think like that. Spam is what they call unwanted email.
All of which leads to much wringing of hands when preparing to cold call someone via email. So I thought I'd use a particularly crass example to point out how not to do it. I give you...the link exchange request that failed...
Here are the cropped screenshots of the email's beginning and end (the rest was equally inappropriate):
Here are the numbered comments:
1. I've never heard of the address listed. It would have been better to make a clear reference to my site in the subject line, so I'd consider it relevant and personal to me.
2. The email address and the site mentioned in the subject line do not match. On top of that, the email address is impersonal. I rarely get one-to-one email from people who call themselves "webhosting."
3. The lady doth protest too much, methinks. A personal email requires no such disclaimer. It merely suggests I'm not the first to get this email, and people think it's spam.
4. Typos and bad English everywhere. Since I have no idea who sent the email, I can't make allowances for those without English as their first language. It just reads badly.
5. This "webmaster" chap. Who is he? If the sender had actually looked at my site, they'd know my name and use it.
6. I have no single "active links page" suggesting, again, nobody actually paid any attention to me or my site.
7. A lovingly impersonal signature.
(Note also that in several countries, this email would be illegal under media/anti-spam/data laws.)
All in all, we have an entirely impersonal email, written badly using a form letter and layout (suggesting a bulk mailout using mailmerge), with irrelevant content and no suggestion that the sender had taken a proper look at the website they want to do business with.
Recipient's conclusion: spam. Net effect of cold call attempt: rejected email, possible spam report potentially followed by blacklisting, bad image for the company concerned.
More on permission | Tags: uce, spam, email solicitiations, bad email
[This post brought to you by Campaigner Email Marketing]
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