I sign up for many ezines, blogs, rss feeds and newsletters. After a time, you find that some of them no longer provide you the info you need or want. Maybe you don’t have the time to read the mountains of information you thought you could and sometimes you decide you just want to opt out.

I’ve personally had the experience (as have many of you, I’m sure) of using a company’s unsubscribe option to opt out of a newsletter/ezine/rss feed, only to continue receiving info from them. On top of that, I often find that I am receiving info from other companies that I have never had contact with—only to discover that, in many instances, they are related to some of the businesses that I opted out from! NOT cool, not good business and certainly not a relationship builder. There are always people that are eager and interested in your products and services. Your marketing goal is to identify who they are, find out what their challenges are and let them know that you have the answers to their needs. Forcing people into hearing what you have to say when they are no longer interested, is sure to have nothing but a negative impact on who you are and what you do.

When someone’s mind is made up and they have a negative experience with you in any form, that experience can spread like wild fire. Today’s post from Marketing Prof’s “Get to the Point” is a perfect example. This post is spreading like wildfire across the internet as I write this. There is enough business out there for all of us. You never have to force anyone to do business with you or listen to what you have to say. Focus on the people who are dying to hear from you and have them spread that to other like minded people! The reward will be never ending!

Best Nicole

How’s This for Passing the Buck?

One year ago, Lynda Partner wrote—but did not publish—a blog post that eviscerated a software company for taking liberties with her email address, and then treating her complaint with stunning indifference. “Why publish it now, you ask? This week I got more spam from this same company,” she says. “It made me so angry that I dug up this post and I hope it gets wide distribution.”

It all began with an email, purportedly from the company’s CEO, that invited Partner to become an “ambassador” for the company, a role filled by “its biggest fans, best users, and closest friends.” There was only one problem: she had never heard of this CEO and couldn’t figure out why he had her email address.

“It took me a while,” she says, “but it turns out that when I opened a Web-hosting account recently, the hosting provider offered a free download of [the CEO's] software. I did not download it. So how did they get my email address?”

Partner wrote a brief note saying she never opted in to the company’s campaigns, and requesting confirmation that her email address had been removed from its list. The person who replied continued to insist she had downloaded the software and that the only way to stop receiving messages from his company was to cancel her account.

The result? Partner’s scalding post now travels the Internet.

The Po!nt: Use common sense. Pushy tactics like these are nothing more than self-destructive.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 17th, 2009 at 10:32 am and is filed under Online Marketing. Tagged: BLOG, BLOG POST, BUSNIESSES, COMPANIES, EMAIL, EMAIL ADDRESS, EZINE, GET TO THE POINT, internet, LYNDA PARTER, MARKETING PROFS, NEWSLETTERS, NICOLE MCKINNEY, PRODUCTS, RSS FEED, SERVICES, SOFTWARE, SPAM. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.