Please Take Me Off Of Your E-Mail Distribution List

September 4th, 2007 Sean Murphy

This alas is a one line E-mail that I now find myself sending several times a week. It’s part of my effort shrink my E-mail backlog, although I have no more hope than Canute of stemming the incoming tide, but it gives me the illusion of progress.

Just because you can send a lot of E-mail using a sales automation tool and it appears that it cost you nothing, should you?

• There are risks to your reputation (of which you only have one) if prospects feel that you are not authentic or are willing to waste their time.
• There are risks of lowering the trust a prospect might otherwise give you if they feel that you are not genuine.
• There are consequences that you get added to e-mail filters so that your subsequent messages are simply deleted before they are read.

Not everything needs to be a personal communication, and a form letter in response to an inquiry is different from an unsolicited offer. I think that these E-mails that pretend to be personal but are clearly bulk–I suspect this when my name is in ALL CAPS, or I am addressed as “Dear Colleague”–actually work against any trust the sender is (or should be) trying to build with me as a prospect. What I am objecting to is not a newsletter that is sent with an unsubscribe link–”it is what it is”–but mass produced E-mail generated from a database that attempts to be personal but clearly isn’t.

We use services like 123Signup and iContact because they have strong anti-spam policies and they include an unsubscribe link in every e-mail.

Entry Filed under: skmurphy