Another poor marketing email

I receive many poor emails, but sometimes I am amazed at them and have to share them in the hope of reducing the number of bad emails being sent.

In this case, the email was from someone who can apparently improve my email marketing – how can I trust that claim when their email is so poor itself?

So here are the main issues and the corresponding lessons to be learned:

• subject “Meeting request for Tash” email opening “Hi, well…”
  lesson – if you can put my name in the subject, how hard would it be to address the email to me too? Names are important, and beyond getting my attention in the subject
• opening sentence “Well I hope this note finds you well”
  lessons – using well twice in such a short sentence looks wrong and lazy, and the opening well doesn’t really fit there anyway; it is an email not a note
• “I know you place tremendous value on your time, so I’ve included an overview of what we do”
  lesson – you may assume or expect it but  you know anything about me; why give me an overview when I don’t even know who you are? Perhaps “so I will introduce myself quickly” or just “so I will be brief”
• “in-house data append… we would run append test and get back to you with the appended fields”
  what does data append mean (no, not a facetious question as I really don’t know and this email doesn’t even give me enough clues to guess!) Pretty obvious lesson – don’t use jargon or terms the reader may not know, or at least define them!
• “If you are looking at adding value to your investment and get more revenue…”
  what investment are we talking about? Do you mean adding value to my business, my brand, my marketing, or something else? Lesson – be clear and finish with something relevant to the entire message
  lesson – use good grammar when doing a cold call like this. ‘If you are looking at… get more revenue’ does not read well – no complicated grammar there!
• “Send us a 50 -100 records from your database…”
  Does this mean now or after we sign up for your service? Do I have any assurances how you will use that data – I care about the privacy of my subscribers. And more grammar issues (“a records” just grates!)
• Listed fields they include (which I don’t think is very relevant in a first call email but anyway) has ‘zip code’ which I don’t like – either they are emailing me from the US or they have copied a US email and are too lazy to localise it. Lesson – if in Australia, use Australian terminology, and likewise for any other grouping of people
• The email includes her name, her job title and the name of a business (presumably the one she is emailing about but she never actually mentions them in the email!) so I don’t know where she is from and a .com email address again gives me no assurance she is Australian.
  lesson – provide contact details and enough information for the reader to know how relevant your message is for them. Knowing where she is from affects things like currency (not such an issue while the AUD and USD are so close), time zones for support, spam and privacy laws and also how relevant her data acquisition would be
• under her signature is one line “To stop receiving our newsletters, reply back with STOP in the subject line”
  lesson – anti-spam laws at their minimum but surely an email company can have an automated unsubscribe system? What is worse, however, is the thought that I may get newsletters from these people when I never asked for it and certainly don’t want it after this email! If she has subscribed me as well as emailed me, I would be tempted to report her for spamming.

How would you respond to getting such an email? Would you just delete it as spam anyway, send a terse ‘no thanks’ or would you ignore all these issues if the service itself was of interest?