A Few Words on Customer Service and a Gift For You
As I’ve written before, I’m on a lot of lists and subscribe to a lot of newsletters. I probably should unsubscribe from the ones that don’t deal directly with eBay marketing, but I think it’s important to keep up with what the rest of the internet marketing world is up to. From the good newsletters I receive good information that will be useful as my business grows, I get an occasional free and useful item, and, of course, I get notified of all the giveaway events.
The end of the year and the holiday season brought a lot of giveaways. I almost always sign up, although I’ve found myself downloading fewer of the products. However, I’ve picked up some good stuff, either to learn from or to sell on eBay, which means I’m subscribed to a few more lists. I don’t keep track of what gift led to which newsletter; I just watch to see if I get any value from the new ones. Which leads to today’s customer service commentary.
I’d been noticing for a few weeks emails from “mailing list.” At first I thought it must be spam, but the email return address had what sounded like an internet marketing theme, so I decided to see what it was. I did see that the sender didn’t include a signature line or address, or unsubscribe information (by the way, required by CAN-SPAM), so I figured it was a newbie trying to build a list and using their own autoresponder. Okay, I’ll see what it’s about.
Nothing really stuck to my mind as any sort of good information; then I got an email saying that if I didn’t submit my gift to the giveaway, I’d be deleted from the list. Oh, ummm, I know very well I didn’t sign up to be a giveaway contributor, because I’m still working on getting an IM product ready. Hmmm, well then, I’ll be deleted. Again, nowhere in the email was there a reference to what the giveaway was or even a link to where I was supposed to submit my contribution.
Except that I didn’t get deleted. So, the next email I got, again without any specifically useful information nor any unsubscribe information, I replied with “unsubscribe me.” That bounced, so I went looking to see if I could find this person. I did find him and found a valid contact email. I asked to be unsubscribed and mentioned that he’d probably want to comply with the law by putting an unsubscribe method in his emails (in what I thought was a helpful tone).
This person’s reply to me was that he’d unsubscribe me, not just from this particular list, but from all of his “more than 30″ newsletters. Not only was I unsubscribed, my email address would be banned from those lists! What?
I have no idea what those lists are, and I’m not feeling any great loss that I won’t ever do business with him. It’s just that this strikes me as being a really stupid way to do business. He doesn’t know the first thing about me or my buying habits or whether I have a huge list of my own that might be helpful to him in his business. There was no sorry to see you go, what can I do, or any other sort of attempt at customer service. His loss, certainly not mine!
Enough of that rant. The point I’m trying to make is that this is a horrible example of how to treat customers or potential customers. I can’t imagine this marketer is going to be able to build much of a business with this kind of attitude. The lists I stay with and the people I buy from (some of the very big names) are always helpful and treat me with respect. That’s probably why they’re the big guys.
Now, onto your gift.
If you’ve been reading along, you’ll remember how excited I was to find Open Office for writing and converting documents to .pdf. It is a great program, easy to use, and it probably has more features than I’ll ever even know about, much less use. The only problem for me is that the program is HUGE and it would only install on my c drive. A very real problem with my old, small capacity, laptop.
But I learned about a new program that does, at least for now, enough of the same stuff that I’ll be able to produce pdf’s on it that will be well-formatted. It’s called ewriterpro. You may have seen emails about it; it’s being sold for about $10 all over the net. However, one of my nice marketers gave it away! So I’m paying that forward. Download your copy here:
It also comes with master resale rights. I’ve only just started playing with it, and I’m getting excited again about getting something written and ready to sell. There are also some bonuses for you to look at.
That’s it for today. Good Sunday to you.
