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Gina X

Hello, this is Gina X, I have to keep my identity concealed because I’m about to tell an extremely embarrassing story about a client of mine. The story has to do with an email marketing disaster. Don’t let this happen to one of your prospects or clients.  This is the story.

I went to a restaurant approximately two to three weeks ago. I had a meeting explaining our services in the offline business world that we do. I was led to believe that she liked the email marketing the best. Seeing as though it is a resort town restaurant and it is strategically placed on the beach so they do get a high volume of traffic. Now, that day they decided to think about it, the owner and the restaurant manager. So I called back two weeks later because I had heard from a little birdie that they were running contests on who could accumulate the most email addresses. Now, I know they had not hired my company which will remain nameless at this moment to preserve all identities.

I gave them a call and I said would you like me to come back? Are there any other questions I could possibly answer for you to help you get started with your email marketing? She said yes, please come in on Thursday. No problem. I went to this appointment on that Thursday. After about an hour of meeting with the restaurant manager, she finally confessed to me. Did you hear the story? And I said no what story? And she said, well, we tried to do email marketing on our own. I’m like ok which I already kind of had an idea of because I heard like I said from a little birdie.

This manager went as far as printing their own little lead capture cards. They went as far as using an AOL address account. Number one bad. Never use AOL, GMAIL, YAHOO, for email. Why? Because AOL will catch on that it is a person that is spamming and they will seize their IP address. Therefore they can never use that email address for their business ever again. It’s also very unprofessional. So she did this, on the bottom of her lead capture cards she had printed “we will not share, rent or sell your information.”

Well, they thought they were suave, and smart and playing trickery on me. They thought it was easier to save a dollar than do it professionally and do it themselves. But they were wrong and I’ll tell you why. When she sent out this email to her one hundred fifty customers, she did not bcc them. So every single person on that list got to see everybody else’s email address. So therefore she made one hundred fifty people very mad because now all of those people saw all of the other people’s personal email addresses in their email.

Here is where it gets bad. One of the funny people on her list decided to take her email which was for a pajama and DJ party and change the text and add some graphics. They thought they would be funny. They changed it to a D*#K and DJ party and decided to implement some nice pornographic pictures. And then they sent it to everybody on their list. Yes, not a very good story. You can bet that restaurant owner pissed off one hundred fifty customers that may never return much less ever go back on their list ever again.

So, here is my tip, if you have a feeling that a customer that you meet with thinks that they can do this on their own, tell them a little bit of this story. I guarantee you will be hired for the job and they will not even attempt to do it on their own.  And if they do attempt, so be it. Hope this doesn’t happen to them. Hope this helps. Gina X.