Win Customers By Treating Them Like Idiots

It is often uncomfortable to deceive people in person.   Most people don't like having to look someone in the face and lie to them.   But email......well, that's a different story.

Ardath Albee shares a story of deceptive email practices in her blog post Do Your Marketing Emails LIE?  She talks about an email she received after attending a conference:

They start off with thanking me for visiting their booth at Dreamforce. Which I did not. And the message tells me they likely sent a blanket email to the entire attendee list.

Then there's this paragraph:

"I have appended a "Weekly Marketing Insight" below which I thought you would find interesting. Sent to your Inbox automatically, it helps uncover where you might consider saving marketing dollars, which of your online prospects should be followed up on immediately, and which web pages are viewed the most by your target markets."

I thought, Cool - something useful. And scrolled down. But what I found wasn't useful. Heck, it wasn't even truthful.

They proceeded to show me a few charts professing to reveal activity at my website. However, when matched against my analytics for the week specified, the numbers had zero correlation to reality.

This blog post has already been picked up by MarketingProfs.  My guess is tens of thousands of folks are now reading about  Ardath Albee's experience with this deceptive company. 

As one of the blog post commenters noted,  "It takes years to establish a good reputation and seconds to destroy it."

This is especially dangerous with women.  Women's brains are hard-wired to tie negative events to the emotional centers of their brain.   This leaves a strong and lasting impression. 

These deceptive practices may generate a short-term gain, but with today's social media landscape, the chances are excellent many, many people will find out you are treating your prospective customers like idiots. 

Take Ardath Albee's advice - Don't lie to your leads.

Comments

[dj adelaide]

i hate it how people blatantly try to scam others like that, so annoying!

[web development]

Well this was an interesting post...haven't heard of such a thing before.Look forward to more such posts.

[lots in costa rica]

The subject is very funny and the information very interesting, thanks for the blog.

[Dorotea]

Ugh. I remember being one of a dozen fmaele sys admins at an AIX conference back in the mid-90 s. I've also been accused of being a booth babe at Linux World where some clueless guy would come up to me and say, can I talk to someone who actually works at Intel? and having to respond with something like, well I manage a team of people at Intel responsible for enabling open source applications for new Intel processors . Sheesh.