Leave people alone with stalking emails – this is not marketing!
The line between email marketing and spam is thin. We can try to adhere to them – or we do it like marketing Udo and exaggerate to the point of stalking. Don’t be like Udo.
Imagine you leave the house in the morning and someone immediately speaks to you: “Hey, we met at this party the other day!” You think hard and gloomily remember that three minutes ago you listened to a friend’s acquaintance for five minutes at the classic drunk and politics monologue before you fled to the bar. Udo, who is talking to you now, is a good friend of this acquaintance, and he would like to continue talking to you about politics. Because all you really want to do is go shopping, you just pass Udo.
From now on Udo will be at your door every day. Once he tells you that he can remember your (never happened) exchange exactly because you would be, uh, “relevant”. The next time he’ll tell you your job is “very interesting” too. Sometimes he screams. One day he wants to show you a great video in which he himself talks about politics. Sometimes he says things like, “I saw through your window that you opened my letter. Don’t you even want to answer me? ”.
Because Udo really annoys you, you go out the back door from now on. You climb over the garden fence, there you see Udo. He’s already waiting for you. “You never reacted at your front door, so I thought I would try it here. I’m looking forward to the conversation! “. If you don’t feel the urge to jump in Udo’s face, you simply have superhuman nerves.
Udo really exist – only that they don’t stalk you on your doorstep, but on the Internet. Because my contact details and I are apparently fair game on the web. The party was Dmexco, where I briefly zapped into different sessions. This is interpreted directly as an intimate connection between two soul mates, so that you can now sell me expensive annual subscriptions for tools that I as an editor don’t need at all. Udo is the speaker’s marketing sales dude. I wonder if Udo’s fingers aren’t bleeding from all the emails he writes to me. Oh no, wait a minute: “Your position is relevant and your company is very interesting” is copy-paste, hupsi. On the one hand, Udo didn’t even look at who I am – because then he would know that I have nothing in common with his customers. I write about things, but I don’t do the things myself. Nothing with a relevant target group, more like “I have an email address, I have great emails”. On the other hand, however, Udo knows that I have opened his e-mail and is therefore sending me even more e-mails. In which he tells me that he knows that I opened the email. How loud does Udo want to shout that he’s following me? Speaking of loud, phrases are often printed in bold or underlined – or both. I can read, Udo! Just because it’s in bold doesn’t mean it’s more relevant to me.
Because Udo noticed that he couldn’t crack anything by email, he sniffed me out on LinkedIn. Old Sherlock. We would not have had the chance to start an exchange yet. He looks forward to connecting with me! He would also have written me an email asking if I had had the chance to read it. (Udo, you rascal, you know exactly whether I’ve read the email – and I know that because you told me. Just by the way.) Now I lean very far out of the window and assume: If my Tinder match doesn’t answer me anymore, I don’t need to try Instagram, then he doesn’t like me.
Dear Udo: I’m not into you. Not really. Leave me alone. And everyone else: Don’t be like Udo. Be like Inge. Inge gave me a quick shot of her contact details right after the party and summarized what she had said about the evening – and when I didn’t get in touch, that was it. Because Inge wondered how it would work if she arrives three more times. Because: Inge does marketing, not stalking. And now I’m going to block Udo before I really jump in his face.
