The purpose of this blog is to help small and medium-sized business owners maximize their online presence across all major online channels — search engines, social networks, paid display space, etc. In pursuit of that goal, our focus is on sharing actionable best practices lists, case studies, and platform guides. In other words, the emphasis is largely on what you should be doing. From time to time, however, we come across a campaign or a sales pitch that’s just begging to be made into a case study of how you shouldn’t be approaching prospective clients. On Monday, one of our account managers just happened to come across such a campaign. After some deliberation, we decide to share it with you as an example of a sales technique that you should avoid at all costs.
What Happened
One Monday, one of our junior SEO account managers woke up to find one really peculiar email among the other dozens of team emails:
The email subject line was simply “hey”; the body consisted of two sentences, “would you like me to create a professional website for you?” and “please check out my website and give me a call”, and the recipient’s email address was listed in the BCC field. The email did include a phone number and a link to the sender’s website, but we’ve chosen to block those out for privacy reasons.
We could go on and on about all of the things that make us cringe when looking at this pitiful excuse of a marketing campaign, but here’s a quick list to start:
It’s not targeted — the account manager who received the email also happens to be a part-time web developer on the side. In fact, he maintains an active blog that includes samples from his portfolio. Do you really think he’s in the market for a professional web designer?
It’s not personalized — as you can see, the email contains absolutely no greeting, and the recipient’s email address was listed in the BCC field; all signs indicating that this was a mass unsolicited email, the equivalent of spam.
It’s not professional— If you’re only going to write two sentences, at least make sure that there are no glaring grammar mistakes. Capitalization, anyone?
Perhaps most importantly, this sort of a mass, cold-call approach is simply not effective, at least not anymore. By all accounts, the conversion rate for cold calls is usually in the very low single digits, as most people find unsolicited, un-personalized messages to be intrusive and annoying. We know we certainly did.
Have you ever bought something/signed up for a service after receiving an unsolicited advertisement? Let us know in the comments!