Editor’s Note: This post was written by a friend that works at a well-known software company in Boston. For obvious reasons, he can’t use his name, nor the name of his employer. But, he had to get this story out. Enjoy.
Names Have Been Changed to Protect the Guilty
It all started innocently enough: I was a fresh faced kid that had made a name for myself as a “marketing assistant” working part-time in college and then was brought on full-time after graduation. Like any B2B software company, we did a lot of the traditional marketing. My time was pretty much split between our website, trade shows, email marketing, and creating sales collateral.
But then the economy imploded. Thankfully my company was well established, so it looks like we’ll make it through the storm with minimal layoffs. Unfortunately, we did have to tighten our belts; my VP decided to only go to the “most important” trade shows and that we would slash our advertising budget. I really saw nothing wrong with this since both channels had the smallest measurable ROI.
As a result of the changes, I was looking forward to focusing on more inbound marketing activities. In my mind I was outlining a plan to overhaul the website and get the blog cranking. Sadly, I found myself focusing on email “blasting” since it was the cheapest & quickest way to produce new leads.
At first, I started with good content: news related to our industry and a series on best practices. Our open rates & click-thru rates were awesome, then I sent an email talking about our new features. Wow – did that produce a decent amount of leads for the sales team. This would prove to be my downfall. The VP of Sales insisted that I start sending more sales emails – different offers & promotions. Every week, if possible.
My nurturing emails were now becoming an afterthought. The monthly email calendar was filled with promotional emails about our product for new customers, with a separate track for existing customers, where the messaging was trying to get them to upgrade. My metrics were quickly declining, while the unsubscribe notifications were increasing.
Not to be deterred by our shrinking pool of email recipients, the executive team decided to start purchasing lists of names & email addresses. I cringed at this, but somehow rationalized it. Again, this tactic produced good sales leads, so everyone high fived. Then I started getting notifications from our email service provider (ESP) that our sending IP-address had been added to a watch list of spammers. I hoped that this would reinforce my argument that we were spamming and that nurture emails would be more effective in the long-run. But my cries fell on deaf ears.
“Leads! We need more leads!”
A few more black-list notifications later, and I found myself in a meeting about how to protect our brand and email marketing channel. Again I proclaimed, “Inbound Marketing will work, it just needs time!”. Instead, I walked away from the table with an unthinkable task on my desk: sign-up for a second ESP that will only be used for our purchased lists. Once we’ve vetted addresses through that list, they would be uploaded into our primary system for our monthly email blasts.
Despite the growing readership of our company blog, and the increasing number of downloads of our ebooks, I have now resigned myself to the fact that I have become what I despise: a spammer. I say things like: “They would want our emails if they knew about us” and “It’s not like I’m selling Viagra, this is a REAL product”.
At the end of the day, this spamming is producing some leads, but I still look at the conversion numbers on my email nurturing track, and they blow the spam leads out of the water further down the sales funnel.
Excuse me while I go cry into my list of emails.
