Email Marketing Fail

BCC – it’s an email marketer’s best friend. In short, the feature allows emails to be sent to more than one recipient without the recipients seeing who else the email has been sent to. This is the perfect solution for a supplier who wants to contact multiple potential customers at once, right? Right! They can send the same message to 50, 100, even 150 people at one time, without exposing the email addresses of everybody being contacted.

BCC is a smart feature and it works wonders to help save time – however, it does have to be used to be effective! All too often suppliers fall into the trap of failing to use the BCC option and, instead, copying and pasting hordes of email addresses into the ‘To’ field, meaning each and every person contacted can see exactly who else the email has gone out to. Cue disaster…and, sometimes, hilarity!

This type of email faux pas happens regularly across all areas of business but recently we were included in a particularly amusing case of BCC amnesia, when we (along with 144 of our fellow agencies!) were contacted in regards to signing up for off shore web development services.

The bulk of other email addresses that had been included was so long it took a good deal of scrolling to get to the actual content, which was the usual spiel about money-saving web development services and top of the range CMS customisation. Within minutes of receiving the email the replies started to come through thick and fast, with certain agencies expressing pure distaste at this business practice and others cracking the inevitable ‘thanks but no thanks…have you tried contacting our competitors? Oh…wait’ jokes.

Needless to say, it’s doubtful that the company in question will receive any business from a single agency on the list – which was comprised of almost 150 WordPress agencies and WordPress consultants. With one slip of the finger this company has managed to alienate themselves from 145 potentially valuable customers – which is the perfect example of why professionalism via email is so important.