Email marketing stupidity

I just renewed the domain registration for kalsey.com through Register.com. Right after I did so, I received a couple automatic responses from them via email. Neither response had a subject line. I have to open each message to see what it is about. That’s just plain dumb.

The subject line of a message is what your customers first see when they receive your message. It’s also the only part of your message that stares them in the face the entire time the message sits in their inbox; even when they have someone else’s message open, your subject line is still in front of them.

The second dumb mistake they made is in not tailoring the email message to me. Here’s an excerpt of the first email they sent. I’ve added emphasis and munged the email addresses to protect me from spam.

From: renewals AT register.com [mailto:renewals AT register.com] Sent: Tuesday, July 09, 2002 11:17 AM To: adam AT kalsey.com Subject:

Dear Adam,

Thank you for using Register.com to renew
kalsey.com

You may be interested to know that we offer a wide variety of
products and services to help you build your Web site, protect
and build your brand online, and enjoy the use of your domain names:

...

***Adam AT kalsey.com CAN BE YOURS***
Get your personalized email box to accompany your domain names!
Build professional boxes such as sales AT kalsey.com
or create a memorable email account
at Adam AT kalsey.com.

Register.com took the time to create a personalized email by inserting my name into the message, but failed to do a simple check to see if their marketing message might apply to me.

They sent the message to adam AT kalsey.com, but still included a marketing message that tells me I could get the email address adam AT kalsey.com. I obviously already know this.

It is a big pet peeve of mine when a company tries to market a service to you that they know you already have. I get postcards every other month from the local cable company offering me their broadband Internet service. I’m already a subscriber. In fact, that’s probably how they have my name and address, since I don’t subscribe to any of their other services.