Email Promotion Gone Awry

This morning I received an email promotion from a well-known vendor of email and CRM services, offering a free white paper on high impact email marketing. I was intrigued – I’m always interested in what industry leaders are thinking when it comes to current email marketing best practises. So I clicked the link and, voila, I was immediately taken to a ‘register to download this whitepaper’ form. So far, pretty basic stuff right – get their interest, capture their information. Except that I originally joined this mailing list when registering to download some research using this very same form.

Why, I wondered, was I subjected to this annoying and repetitive typing – they already knew all of this information about me. Why not pre-fill this form with the answers I’d already given during a previous visit, and give me the option to update anything that’s no longer valid? Some people will be too lazy to complete this form again and again and again – the result, irritation. Not the branding objective I believe they were going for. Worse – they’ll get folks like me. I completed the form honestly the first time around. This time, I didn’t. I didn’t bother to correct a type in my mailing address, answered I don’t know to every question I possibly could – what can I say, I’m ornery that way. Thing is, I’m hardly unique. End result – a once clean record gets dirty.

But hey, I gave my real email address and I finally got to the download page, clicked the icon and got my little hands on the PDF. I’m happy – I’ve got valuable data in exchange for my information. Then… the air swooshed out of my newly inflated balloon. The whitepaper is a 2 year old report.

Lesson learned – don’t ask busy executives to do the same clerical task over and over again and don’t send out of date information as a way to brand yourself an industry expert. Just a thought…