With the high profile story last week that No.10 Downing Street is the alleged epicentre of political bullying, I wanted to share my experiences of bullying!
My loyalty is being rewarded for nearly ordering something
A few weeks ago, I tried to buy some business cards from VistaPrint – these were primarily for me to you use for publicising my blog. I have business cards for work – but they don’t have details of my ‘personal’ blog on, obviously. I thought I would be clever and get some cards just with my name, blog address (here) and my mobile. Very minimalistic. I went through a whole process of design with VistaPrint and then got to the check-out. They wanted to charge me nearly £8 to post the cards. As I had only ordered 250 I felt as though I had been duped. So I didn’t bother completing the order.
Ever since then, they have been ‘bullying’ me. I get an email everyday. It either tells me that I seem to have forgotten to press the ‘yes please rip me off’ button, or offering me great new deals of the century. Yesterdays was rewarding my loyaty (above). What loyalty – I haven’t bought anything!
I got fed up a week ago and tried to stop them, but they needed me to jump through a number of hoops which I don’t have time for. So I continue to get the emails every day and just delete them. But I consider their constant pestering nothing short of bullying! And a violation of my private inbox.
They must think their ‘marketing’ works – or they wouldn’t do it. It doesn’t work – it turns me off. To me their emails are spam. Unwanted and irritating.
I was then reminded by our firms spam filter consultants (Syntax) about just how much spam the firm gets. There are around 60 of us on email and over three years we have received 15,900,000 emails. Of which 93.7% were spam! and 58,000 were malicious viruses! Thats a whopping 14.95m emails that are just junk that we have to pay to filter. More bullying!
There have been some high profile cases of catching the spammers – but the war is just relentless. And we are often offered by email ‘lists’ of valid email addresses – by the million – if we want to buy them for a marketing campaign.
Email is brilliant – and has revolutionised business mail traffic. It is incredibly flexible, fast and relatively (?) secure. But it has some significant downsides too. Spam costs money to filter out – and wastes an incredible amount of money / energy.
My warning to you – think carefully before you sign up and give your email address to anyone! Especially VistaPrint.
UPDATE 5 March 2010
I had an email from VistaPrint – see below. Fair play to Jim for picking the blog up and taking the trouble to write. I will change from angry to indifferent (although I’m not sure I was angry – just fed up). Waiting 21 days isn’t really an option – but as they have to come from a different Country there is an explanation! I have now opted out of the email marketing. As I said before this sort of mailing (daily) must work – or they wouldn’t do it. It drove me to distraction!
Good morning Mr Garratt,
I found your blog post this AM and wanted to respond.
Firstly, I regret that you found our shipping prices too high or to have been trying to “dupe” you. I’m in our US operations, and £8 does seem like a lot to me, so I went onto our UK site and designed a premium BC, quantity 250 and checked the shipping price to send them to 10 Downing (the easiest place I could think of where I could find a valid post code and I was trying to ensure that we didn’t have a shipping price calculation bug or something). I found 21 day shipping to be £3.77. From time to time, we offer various discounts on shipping or product, and obviously slow shipping is cheaper than fast shipping. Our European-destination products are manufactured in our facility in The Netherlands, and shipped from there to their final destination.
Secondly, and more importantly, the emails you are receiving are because you are signed up for and are receiving our “retention” marketing emails, which are generally intended to retain/entice past customers. I wouldn’t read too much into the graphics thanking you for your loyalty, which do apply the majority of the recipients of those emails.
I don’t agree with your characterization of those emails as cyber-bullying, which is a far more serious concern than receiving opt-in marketing emails for business cards and marketing products. However, if you no longer wish to receive those emails, you may opt out by clicking the opt-out link on any one of those emails, or by going to our account update page and unchecking the box labeled “Yes, I want to receive regular emails about products, services and promotional offers from Vistaprint.”
For your convenience, that page is at http://www.vistaprint.co.uk/
The entire process should take you less than 2 minutes to accomplish using either of the means above, and entails no “hoops” to jump through.
Naturally, I’d encourage you to try Vistaprint, at a product/shipping price with which you are comfortable, but if that’s not in the cards I at least want you to be indifferent towards rather than angry at us…
I’m not writing to you in any official customer service capacity; instead I run the IT Operations at Vistaprint and as a result monitor and ensure our compliance with regards to any/all email compliance activities at Vistaprint and as a result monitor a variety of feeds that mention Vistaprint. While this doesn’t directly fall into an email compliance concern, when I see blog posts of unhappy customers (or near-customers), I naturally want to help them be happy with Vistaprint, even if that means having nothing further to do with us.
Respectfully and sincerely,
Jim Sokoloff
Vice President, Technology Operations, Vistaprint.
