::sniff::

Do y’all smell something … rancid? Like … the fetid stink of a carcass rotting in the hot summer sun?

Yeah. I smell it too. But I don’t think it’s yesterday’s garbage. It’s the stench of REALLY bad marketing. This morning, we happened upon this post from Marc Ensign: meMarketing & the Worst “It Was Nice Meeting You” eMail You Will Ever Read.

In it, Marc shared an email he received after attending a networking conference of some sort (which one is totally immaterial). G’head. Click the link. Read. BEHOLD a level of self-promoting douchebaggery the likes of which the world has never seen. I’ll wait.

::hums “Jeopardy” theme music::

Done? Excellent.

So, what have we learned? Aside from the fact that the writer of this email is clearly overcompensating for … something and will likely live the rest of his days being kept company by his epically large ego, I mean.

If you take out the absolutely incomprehensible level of jackholery here, what we see is a self-promoting marketing email. It’s the sort of thing we often refer to as “meMail”. And it’s the sort of thing lots of salespeople send to their customers, web leads, and so on (though we concede that none we’ve ever seen reaches this level of detritus). Each and every day, our email inboxes are littered with messages telling us about how awesome their senders are, how fantastic their achievements, how happy they’ve made others.

That kind of thing has GOT to stop.

If salespeople stopped for a second to think about what it’s like to be on the receiving end of a message like that and how little people actually care about those things, no one would ever send one again. If salespeople stopped to consider what they might do for their messages’ recipients, or if they simply sent out a friendly message to say, “HI!” then they’d get a heck of a lot farther. They’d start conversations and on their heels, develop relationships: relationships that would lead to more business, BETTER business, referrals, the whole nine yards.

So join us in the fight! Join forces with Happy Grasshopper! Let’s put an end to putrid, soul-sucking putrescence like this and get about the business of doing what works.

About the Author Happy Grasshopper

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