Marketing emails

As CTO of DevExpress, and as someone who’s had his personal email address for nearly 20 years now (I bought boyet.com in November 1998 and created my email address immediately), I get a lot of marketing-type emails, let alone those of a phishing variety. And, to be honest, I’m sure my readers are in the same boat.

For quite a while now I’ve made fun on Twitter of some of the “personalized” marketing emails I’ve received (that is, those that are addressed to me, er, personally). A quick set of examples:

Email subject: "Hello Julian Bucknall, In-Psoern Meeting With [...]"
Me: FFS, you don't care enough to proofread the subject line?

— Julian M Bucknall (@JMBucknall) November 7, 2017

Email: "You’re much better off learning from other people’s mistakes..."
Me: You use Arial & Helvetica in the same sentence, point taken.

— Julian M Bucknall (@JMBucknall) November 6, 2017

Email: "I have gone through with your website and I found that we could collaborate some business synergies..."
Me: ...
Me: ...
Me: Nope.

— Julian M Bucknall (@JMBucknall) November 3, 2017

Email: "...introduce us & discuss on a possible synergy which we can bring in collaboration for you."
Me:

— Julian M Bucknall (@JMBucknall) October 30, 2017

Email: "If I don’t hear back from you, I’ll assume the timing isn’t right."
Me: Dude, it's the service you're marketing that is irrelevant.

— Julian M Bucknall (@JMBucknall) October 25, 2017

In essence, if you are going to send out marketing emails that look pretty much like ordinary emails, I would expect, nay, demand, that you spend some bloody time proofing them, make them read well, and ensure that they are of interest for the recipient. I’ve lost count of the number of emails to me, the CTO, that basically state that the person sending the email has “visited” the main DevExpress site, learned what we do and what we sell (yet failing miserably), and then willfully states there is obviously some way they can help us based on their faulty impressions.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been pursued (as it were) by email by someone who’d done the same for my blog here.

I noticed you've shared Grooveshark (http://grooveshark.com/) on this page https://boyet.com/blog/html5-and-validation-issues-with-this-blog/, as you are no doubt aware, Grooveshark actually closed down back in 2015. We’ve put together a guide to the best alternatives in 2017. Perhaps you could update your page to include a link to our guide.

Well, that’s groovy, one might say, until one actually does a smidgeon more research (oh I don’t know, by using the Search box that’s present on every page?). In fact, until this very post you are currently reading, there is exactly one and only one post where I mention Grooveshark: the page from January 2012 that’s mentioned in this stupid email. If one actually read the text on that page, or even, heaven forfend, just the paragraph that alludes to Grooveshark, one would immediately see that I DISCUSS THE REMOVAL OF EVERY SINGLE MENTION OF AND LINK TO GROOVESHARK ON MY BLOG.

So, no, oh wise marketing person hoping for a link back to your site, I don’t give a rat’s ass about letting people know about alternatives to Grooveshark. I used it for two weeks in January 2012 (someone told me about it on the 3rd, and the post where I decided to remove it is dated the 19th) and that was that.

  Loading links to posts on similar topics...