Spamcial Marketing. Please Don't Do It.

About a year and a half ago, I met a pret­ty suc­cess­ful moti­va­tion­al speak­er and busi­ness coach. I had heard about him for years, and a good friend who knew him well intro­duced me to him after one of his talks. He thought we’d hit it off as we had a lot of sim­i­lar client types and mar­ket­ing ideas. I could tell right away he was not all that excit­ed to talk to me (body lan­guage). He was polite, had a fake smile and tried hard to be inter­est­ed in the con­ver­sa­tion. (Because he knows that is what all suc­cess­ful peo­ple are sup­posed to do, right?: think Dale Carnegie: Be gen­er­al­ly inter­est­ed in oth­er peo­ple). After a cou­ple min­utes, he asked for my busi­ness card. Like a suck­er, I gave it to him. Did I per­son­al­ly hear from him again? Was I a real per­son to him? Or was I just anoth­er name to add to his email list? It did­n’t take me long to rec­og­nize his so-called ​“per­son­al” emails as imper­son­al mar­ket­ing blasts. Now his emails are labeled spam in my email pro­gram, and I no longer see them. Why? Because he, like a lot of mar­ket­ing com­pa­nies and busi­ness­es, prac­tice what I call Spam­cial Mar­ket­ing. Yes, I total­ly made up that word. If you can’t guess the mean­ing, here’s a hint: it’s the oppo­site of prac­tic­ing good social and real net­work­ing. In oth­er words, it’s being annoy­ing.

Do You Like Receiv­ing Spam?

Nei­ther does your cus­tomer. This does not mean you can nev­er send your quar­ter­ly newslet­ters, an email blast with a spe­cial and mail­ers to clients ever again. There is a place for that, and you can­not please every­one — espe­cial­ly if you have a large cus­tomer base. My advice is this. At least begin to make a con­cert­ed effort to con­nect more with your cus­tomers social­ly, on and offline. By doing this, you will take those first few steps to reduc­ing imper­son­al mar­ket­ing items and make it more per­son­al. It could also save you some mar­ket­ing dol­lars too by mar­ket­ing only to those who have giv­en you per­mis­sion. One way to do this is ask your cus­tomers if send­ing them emails and mail­ers occa­sion­al­ly are ok. It is per­fect­ly ok to reach out and talk to cus­tomers. They won’t bite! Chances are, if you ask them your­self they will agree and say it is fine to stay on a list. If you don’t ask, at some point, your emails will go to spam and mail­ers will be in the trash bin. Spam­cial Mar­ket­ing. It is easy to make mar­ket­ing these days so cook­ie cut­ter and auto­mat­ed. There will be some fruit from this approach, but is it the long term, qual­i­ty fruit you real­ly want for your busi­ness? Prac­tice being real and gen­uine in all areas of your busi­ness and watch the qual­i­ty of your leads and the repeat busi­ness excel! If you are inter­est­ed in a good book on this sub­ject, take a look at Seth God­in’s Per­mis­sion Mar­ket­ing for some excel­lent insight and advice.

What Are Your Experiences?

Have you made any changes in your mar­ket­ing plan to be more per­son­al? What did you do before? Has the change made a pos­i­tive dif­fer­ence? Thanks for shar­ing your thoughts!