Campaign

So check this out for a well timed, well crafted opening to a direct mail shot:

"Good morning.  Personally I would like to offer you and your business a complimentary session to be held at your place, where together we will run through proven strategies that will enable your business to: 1) Win more Sales (156 ideas);  2) Make more profit.  (126 ideas);  3) Handle more business more efficiently.  (84 ideas)"

Sounds good, doesn't it?  And it was well timed and well targeted.  It had me thinking straight away.  "Personally" had a nice touch.  "Complimentary" made it sound like it was no risk. And it seemed actionable with all those ideas.

Now this came from someone called Ryan Jarvis at a company called ProfitClub.  I had never heard of him but it caught my attention and my PA got in touch with him to arrange that complimentary session.  Then she got in touch with him again.  And again.  And on the third time of not hearing back from this brilliant e-marketer, this man who claimed he knew how to generate and handle more business more efficiently, she came back to me and asked what to do next.

This was my response - quite literally - to the aforementioned Mr. Ryan Jarvis:

"Hello Ryan ... I enjoy the irony of you sending an unsolicited, outbound email telling me you could teach my colleagues how to be better at new business and handle more business more efficiently and then you singularly failed to respond to two attempts to take you up on your offer.
That made me chuckle... At least you gave me some concrete guidance for my team about how to handle new business."

Apart from the chuckling, this made me pause to think about the sort of stuff we always say to our clients - if you are soliciting a response, make sure you can handle it.  Nothing spreads faster than bad experiences.  And in this day and age, that spread, that speed and that power of 'WWWOM' (wicked worldwide word of mouth) can seriously damage business. Why?

Well, it is not only the immediate impact of the shared bad experience but the fact that all this word of mouth - good as well as bad - is archived and will exist for quite a long time.

Take this as a case in point.  Maybe Mr. Jarvis will continue undaunted in his e-mail campaign.  Any recipient of that e-mail will, by definition, have access to the web and a proportion of them who might consider doing business with ProfitClub or Ryan Jarvis might copy and paste his name into a search engine and some may find this story - one person's experience - online.  And my advice to them is do not bother contacting this company.  If his ability to harvest his incoming new business responses is an indication of his ability to teach you anything then I suggest that his teachings will count for nothing.

Interestingly, Mr. Jarvis wrote back to me this morning.  A contrite apology? An automated follow up? A proffered meeting? No.  Just another e-mail this time proudly proclaiming:

"Morning.  I hope this comes as a pleasant surprise to you, having researched your market there are three areas where you can win more business from over 91% of your competitors ..."

Yeah.  And having researched his business, I can tell him there are a couple of areas where he can do the same.  And a couple of them are to follow up on his leads and don't be a pain in the ass by sending more unsolicited, misleading and downright stupid e-mails.