Sometimes the best response to annoyance is to laugh.
Some people in Europe have been under the stubborn delusion that I am interested in electrical generators and coil-winding equipment – since 2000. They send me a couple of paper fliers a year for conferences in Budapest, Berlin and so on. I’m sorry that they waste their paper and their money, although I also feel an undercurrent of hostility at the possibility that they refuse to remove me from this mailing list because the marketing company may be cheating its customers by inflating its distribution list with nonsensical inclusions.
If your organization depends on an external company to provide distribution of your marketing materials to a list over which you do not have control – and they charge you according to how many people they mail or e-mail to – then you should routinely test the effect of asking for removal from their lists by having a group of dummy e-mail and postal addresses (ones you can delete easily without trouble) that subscribe to the list from which you can then ask to be removed. The proportion of removals will give you a sense of how many of the addresses in the mailing list may be suspect – that is, may be for unwilling or unqualified respondents.
For example, if you enroll 100 fake recipients and then ask to have them all removed, discovering that only 50 of them are removed, which gives 95% confidence limits of 40% to 60% for the proportion of removals being acted on, would raise questions about the honesty of the marketing agent.
On the lighter side, here’s the e-mail I sent recently to try once again to get off their mailing list; I think it might have qualified for inclusion in a Monty Python skit. The message for readers is that instead of getting angry, we can actually have fun dealing with these people. And note that I signed my insulting remarks with my real name and contact information….
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Dear Coil Winding Fanatics,
Since 2000, I have been receiving several invitations a year to coil-winding exhibitions all over the world. I have faithfully responded several times a year asking to be taken off your mailing list.
As you can see from the snapshot of the address label,
1) You are spelling my name wrong;
2) You are describing me as employed by Adario, a company that disappeared from this planet – I don’t know about yours – in 2001.
3) Adario was an information-security consultancy; it _never_ had _anything_ to do with insulation, coil, motor & transformer production & repair, sub-miniature and micro inductive devices, coil winding, inductive components, transformers, motors, generators, testing and analysis of electrical gear, or new magnetic materials – not even magnetic fluids and gels.
4) I have been a computer programmer since 1965, a software systems engineer since 1980, a security consultant since 1988, and a university professor since 1976.
So, given your steadfast refusal to consider removing me from your mailing list, I have several suggestions in line with your marketing strategy:
a) Obtain lists of kindergarten children worldwide – especially those who don’t speak English; send them all invitations to your expos.
b) Send invitations to wheat-granary workers.
c) Invite registered nurses specializing in obstetrics to join your conference.
d) Consider sending bales of invitations in lots of 1,000 to institutes of neurology.
Finally, the really good marketing suggestion for you is as follows:
e) Grasp an invitation firmly, roll it up into a 5 mm tube, and jam it decisively up your nose or, preferably, some other bodily orifice well supplied with pain receptors.
Thank you so much for considering my suggestions, if not my repeated requests to get off your distribution list.
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Please support Norwich University ROTC student Zach Wetzel’s fund-raising run for the Semper Fi Injured Marines Fund.
Last year, thanks in part to our joint efforts, he and his fellow students raised $9,000 for the fund!
