I’ve just recieved some email spam that claims:

NOTE: This is not *spam, you have been contacted by a person sending this email manually

Which made me laugh, as it clearly wasn’t sent manually. How do I know? Well it was to my web development business offering a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) service. If it had really been sent manually I doubt they’d email a competitor and offer us three of their client’s contact details. They might also have been able to address it to John or Tristan rather than “Website Manager”.

The other bit that made me laugh was the claim:

I found your website on Google not ranking in the top 10 for your chosen keywords.

Odd you found us on Google, but we don’t rank on Google - that’s a bit of a contradiction. Furthermore as we’ve never discussed it, how do you know what our chosen keywords are? As it happens we do rank No. 1 for our chosen keywords although given how little competition there is for them that’s hardly surprising.

Overall not a great piece of marketing and I haven’t even started on the copywriting, or offer. So whatever your business is take some lessons from this:

1. Don’t claim to have sent an email manually when you clearly didn’t - you’re now a liar so I won’t buy from you.
2. Don’t pretend you know my business, instead ask a question aimed at making me discovering my need for your product or service.
3. Whatever you think, the definition of SPAM varies from person to person, if someone doesn’t want to recieved your email they’ll regard it as spam and will be annoyed by it. They’ll then not buy and possible file a complaint about you.

On a final note as expert SEO’s they’ve only managed to get their own website a up to a PR3… enough said.

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