We all receive unsolicited emails from companies wanting to advertise their services to our business. How many actually listen to what we want from them? I recently received one such email from a company touting their wares in corporate gifts; it was a standard format with examples of how you can put your company logo across a range of products to give to your clients. While I appreciated their marketing strategy, I did not wish to receive their emails and so unsubscribed from their list and my request was acknowledged. However, I then continued to receive emails from them, week after week, and subsequent requests to unsubscribe did nothing to stop the regular deluge of information. I finally resorted to creating a rule to divert all their emails into my junk mail box. All I could think was, ‘What did that company just do to a potential customer?’
The damage
By not actioning my request to unsubscribe from their emails, and not respecting my preferences, the company showed me that they did not value the wishes of any potential customers. As a result, the goodwill generated by their initial email was lost and I made a mental note not to use that company in the future thus the company is losing a potential customer instead of deepening customer relationships.
The consequence: Losing a potential customer
Society as a whole can be fairly predictable; that is why marketing works. If we can help it, we would prefer not to do business with a company we don’t like. Even if that company came up with a product which I really wanted, I would have hesitated to do business with them after they repeatedly spammed my inbox and ignored my requests to stop. By not respecting the seemingly minor preferences of any potential customer, you can actually lose the goodwill generated by your marketing efforts.
Is your business ignoring the seemingly ‘trivial’ requests from your customers? At what potential cost? Are you losing a potential customer?
