I have an underused “I get mail” category over here, which could easily get filled with sarcastic posts about the incompetent and irrelevant marketing crap with which I am constantly bombarded. Instead, I’ve been saving up for the truly special ones: the delightfully, spectacularly, jawdroppingly incompetent marketing idiots.
People like Fiona Hudson-Kelly, whose incompetent spam for training workshops in “professionally managed email marketing” sparked a lengthy rant about the fact that public money is being wasted on crap management consultants and social media training workshops.
More of that sort of thing can be found on Hey, look at this social media clown.
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I am shocked and upset to review your comments and take them very seriously. We purchased a data list in July that we believed to be credible and from an opted in source. I would like extend my apologies for the inconvenience I have caused and thank you for taking the time to bring this to my attention. If you would be kind enough to send me the e-mail address we used in our mailing I will ensure that we delete these from our records immediately. I try to be highly professional in my work life and am very upset about what has happened.
Hi Fiona, thanks for taking the time to drop by, paste the boilerplate comment, and offer your apologies. Despite the attempt to shift the blame to the unnamed third-party mailing list vendor (you didn’t ask questions? verify the data? with 5 year out of date email addresses, didn’t you spot a suspicious bounce rate? if you did, why didn’t you stop sending after the first one?), I might normally be happy to accept the apology and move on. In this case I don’t think I can do that just yet.
You offer to remove my email address from your mailing list. How is this going to solve your problems? Your comment implies that you no longer believe the database you obtained to be a credible source of relevant opt-in email addresses. I am therefore concerned that you seem to believe that merely removing the email addresses of those who complain is adequate. Do you plan to continue sending emails to all of the other addresses in your database, given all of the many and various concerns that have been raised over whether the addresses in the database are either relevant to your campaign or legitimate opt-in registrants? How do you reconcile this with your claim to be able to teach people how to run professionally managed email marketing campaigns?
If this were an issue of a newbie PR assistant messing up, it wouldn’t ever have become a public issue. But I feel it would be unfair to the small businesses considering spending time — and more importantly, on the British taxpayers who would be the ones spending the money — on courses teaching them “professionally managed email marketing campaigns”, were I not to highlight the ironic fact that this is one of the least professionally managed email marketing campaigns on which I’ve ever had the misfortune to be on the receiving end, and that I’ve yet to see demonstrated any serious understanding from you of just how bad this email marketing campaign was and how to rectify the situation.