Buzz Marketing with Blogs: It’s Hard Out Here for an Email Marketer

It’s Hard Out Here for an Email Marketer

Earlier today I received this lovely offer: “I would like you to be our guest for the 2006 Email Insider Summit. As a Summit VIP, the cost of your airfare, hotel accommodations and conference registration will be paid for by MediaPost. The Email Insider Summit Advisory Board has identified you as a senior level marketer or agency executive decision maker within your company. You are among a select few to whom we are extending this special VIP opportunity.”

Earlier today I received this lovely offer:

“I would like you to be our guest for the 2006 Email Insider Summit. As a Summit VIP, the cost of your airfare, hotel accommodations and conference registration will be paid for by MediaPost. The Email Insider Summit Advisory Board has identified you as a senior level marketer or agency executive decision maker within your company. You are among a select few to whom we are extending this special VIP opportunity.”

Nice, eh? All expenses paid three day trip to Arizona. What’s not to like?

This afternoon, I received this email:

“We apologize if you received an email from MediaPost earlier today inviting you as our VIP guest to the Email Insider Summit. That email was intended to be sent to a list of 50 top brand marketers in the industry, that have already agreed to attend the event. The email below is the email that you were intended to receive. ... Again we apologize for the confusion and inconvenience that error may have caused you.”

Well, that first one certainly doesn’t sound like it was supposed to be sent to people who’d already agreed to come! But I think more interestingly, it shows how hard it is to get email right and how easy it is to make mistakes—even for the people who are the ones teaching the rest of us how to market via email. They found their mistake quickly, and apologized contritely. Sometimes, that’s the best you can do.

Posted by Travis Smith on 04/10 at 04:28 PM •

Comments

Now that SUCKS. They get you all primed and then pull the rug out. They didn’t happen to send it CC instead of BCC so you can hack apart the addresses, did they?

Posted by Andy Wibbels on 04/13/06 at 03:41 PM
For my $ it was tacky. Whoever drafted the apology email never read the first which didn’t say “confirming your attendance” but it “would like you to be…” Which strongly implies the guest list was not nailed down when the email was sent.

You handled this blog post with grace! I’d say they missed the boat by not including you in their Top 50.

Posted by Toby on 04/18/06 at 08:48 AM