Cynical email marketing by ambulance chasers
Tuesday, April 20th, 2010This morning I received an email from a company selling an online service that enables virtual meetings to take place. The title of the email was
“When travel halts, online meetings keep business running”
It began with the an emboldened heading Iceland Volcano Cloud: The Economic Impact and a link to the BBC news article with the same title.
The general gist was a standard sales structure where a problem is highlighted (travel plans disrupted), the effects of this problem are explored (people cannot get business done due to lack of mobility and face to face meetings), and then a solution offered (virtual meetings online). The technique is called SPIN (Situation, Problem, Implication, and Needs), and is as old as the hills.
My issues with this email are pretty comprehensive and go beyond the ambulance chasing nature of its “Oh look, natural disaster, buy my product” cynical premise.
The Link on the BBC site concentrates on the businesses hardest hit by the volcano, namely airlines and travel companies. No mention of this is made in the email. Their losses are enormous compared to the fairly minimal losses that are expected to hit other sectors such as those targeted in the email.
We live in a world where voice and video are available on technology in our pockets and where email enables instant exchange of information. There is nothing ground breaking about virtual meetings in 2010, and I hope that their ill conceived attempts at using email marketing to take advantage of a crisis situation fails, with resultant loss of reputation. I am not frightened to name them. I simply do not want to give them any publicity.
Email marketing has a bad reputation amongst a lot of people. My argument has always been that it isn’t email advertising that is bad, it is clueless marketers who use it badly, and this is a perfect (and very sad) example of this. Email is an incredibly powerful tool and an essential part of the Interactive Marketing Mix, but it should be treated with more respect than my inbox was treated to this morning.
