What happened this week was an unsuspecting new business to the area was trying to drum up some new business, right? Sounds simple.

But what they did, ended up being not only a CUSTOMER SERVICE AND PUBLICITY NIGHTMARE. But depending on how they "clean it up", it could be a huge CREDIBILITY KILLER as well.

Now, I'm not going to mention their name because I ended up talking with them and they are generally very nice; they just made an ASTRONOMICAL EMAIL MISTAKE.

So, being a new business, they thought they'd start by email blasting out all the businesses in the local Chamber of Commerce about their B2B service they offer. That probably seemed like the quickest, easiest thing to do (in their mind).

They probably went on to the chamber website and cut and pasted all the email addresses they could find because I'm a member there and I know they don't sell that list. So, tons of time spent doing this, right?

Well, yesterday, I received an email from these folks with the word "newsletter" in the subject line (I knew I had to talk to them about that for one), opened it up and read a little bit. It was basically a text message about their services with a couple links to their website mixed in but no other 'real' content.

The email had a message at the bottom saying people could unsubscribe by replying with the word unsubscribe in the subject line. It wasn't personalized with any one's name or email address though to contact.

It started out though by a "Welcome to our first newsletter" message which I thought was weird since I didn't remember meeting anyone from that company recently. But knowing I could be mistaken since I do talk to a lot of people each week, I thought I would reply and ask them where we met.

So, I replied (only to the one person who sent it to me of course in the TO line, not to the 'reply all' button).

I asked them if we met at a recent event. Then I also mentioned that I help small businesses with their email marketing campaigns and theirs was breaking a few sp'am laws - FYI. I told them about my service for that briefly and sent it off.

They responded back (good to know they weren't a spam piece themselves thankfully). We had a dialog back and forth a couple times (this was pretty late Tuesday night).

I thought nothing of it but hmmm, maybe I'll get a new client and help them maximize their email marketing campaign?

Then the following morning (today - Wednesday) bright and early I started getting calls....

Now for some of you who know me, it's rare to ever catch me anywhere before 10:00 am, much less on the phone even before my coffee BUT at 7:30 am the phone started ringing, and ringing, and ringing. After the 3rd call before 8:30 am (of course I wasn't answering but ...) I figured something was up. I stumbled to my computer and found a bunch of emails and a few messages from angry soles who had been receiving every correspondence between the two of us the night before.

Page 1 of 2 :: First | Last :: Prev | 1 2 | Next