There is a car dealership in town that I occasionally do business with and as a result, I am on their email list. They send out information on promotions and new “used” inventory that comes in from time to time. They don’t send out information often and so I haven’t taken the time to opt-out of their list, although I should.
A month or so ago, I received an email from them saying that Mircrosoft was going to pay me (and them) for every friend I could forward this email to. The request was “Please please please forward this to everyone on your list. This time it’s true and they really are going to pay.” Ok, I can be pretty gullible at times but even I didn’t believe this one. It seems, however, that about 1/4 of the people on their list were. Maybe it was because the request came from a business rather than an individual that made it more believable. I don’t know.
You are probably wondering how I know that roughly 1/4 of the people on their list were convinced to send this email out. Well, their list showed the email addresses of everyone they sent to and, as a result, I received the same email from about 1/4 of the list. All of them believing they were going to get paid great sums of money for all their friends. I guess I was one of their friends.
I knew the car dealership was sending their emails this way when they first started sending them to me but didn’t think too much about it. I didn’t much care for it but didn’t think that anyone on their list cared about my email address and I certainly didn’t care about theirs. After receiving all of those emails though, I cared – a lot.
Almost immediately, I sent an email to them letting them know what I thought of how they handled their email addresses and that I did not appreciate being spammed by them. If they couldn’t learn how to handle email addresses correctly they were to immediately take my name off their list. While I was surprised by the fact that I did not hear back from them with an apology or something, the next email from them came through an email service provider and did not disclose everyones email address.
The point of this story is simple. We all need to realize that our lists are very valuable assets. Our customers have entrusted us with their personal information and it is our responsibility to protect that information as though it were gold. That means doing everything in our power to make sure their email address doesn’t get out to anyone else. It also means having enough respect for those on your list not to send junk to them. We all get enough of that from our real friends, right?
As we have discussed before, your list can be a very powerful asset of your business. It is advertising that is focused like none other. Take good care of it.
What are your thoughts on this?
Photo credit: cindy47452
