Posted by Christopher Stevenson
Do you have any desire to have constant contact with a vendor who sends you SPAM-ish e-mail advertisements? No, me neither, but recently I received an e-mail advertisement for a service that I can't recall. What I can recall, however, is that at the bottom of the e-mail was a logo for Constant Contact.
I didn't have any idea what Constant Contact was, but I knew that the last thing I wanted was to have ongoing e-mails from that vendor.
As it turns out, Constant Contact is a service provider that helps companies with their e-mail marketing and online surveys. With a name like Constant Contact, they appeal to companies that are trying to keep their customers and potential customers in the communication loop. The thing is, from the customer's standpoint, the idea of constant communication from an unknown or little known vendor is probably a turn off. (It was for me.)
Constant Contact blew any chance of successful e-mail marketing to me by trying to piggyback their logo on their client's advertisement. Since I'm not CC's target market and didn't know what it was, all the logo said to me was that if I showed the least bit of interest in the advertised service, I would be in SPAM hell for the rest of my life.
This experience made me wonder how often this kind of thing happens. Constant Contact is a good-sized provider and they screwed up. Might smaller service providers make similar mistakes? Probably. Keep it in mind. If you use an e-mail service, how closely do you monitor what's really ending up in your members' inboxes?
