In an earlier post, I complained about software quality at big companies, illustrated by how they get the "little" things wrong, which of course sometimes builds up into getting really big things wrong.
HP is definitely on a roll in that regard. Just to pick an example, HP decided to buy Autonomy for $11.7 Billion in 2011, and about a year later, was forced to write off $8.8 Billion. In that context, little things like email marketing practices are trivial, things of no concern at all.
But that's the point! Quality starts at the top, it starts at the bottom, and attitudes about it pervade an organization. If no one is particularly concerned about quality, then stuff happens. And seems to be happening at HP (among others).
The importance of email
Some people may think that email is a tiny little unimportant thing. That's odd, because email is an important way that companies communicate with and interact with their customers. The fact that a company's many divisions may send out millions of emails tempts people inside the company to think how insignificant emails are. We send them out by the million!
But in the experience of any one customer, email may have a large role to play in forming their image of the company. Does it make good products that I want to buy? Does it listen to me? Does it respect my views and respond to my requests? When it makes an offer and I respond, what is the company's follow-up?
Email is like a salesperson, or a customer service representative, having an important role to play in the customer's future relationship with the company.
HP and email
Someone in power at HP badly needs to read this. The way HP currently handles their email is a sad example of dissing current and potential customers.
I recently received a couple more spam emails from HP, after many diligent attempts to follow their rules for unsubscribing.
Here's the bottom of the email:
Sounds good, huh? HP doesn't just protect my privacy, they're committed to it. I can choose (hah!) whether HP may communicate with me!
So, yet again, I clicked here to unsubscribe. This time HP put up a new hurdle.
They know what my email address is. All they have to do is what every responsible e-mail marketer does and put it in the unsubscribe URL in order to deliver what customers want, which is one-click unsubscribe. Not exactly a new idea!
But HP, that organization capable of rebuffing double-digit numbers of pleas from me to unsubscribe, has decided to up the ante. Now they demand that I type in my email address! Which they know! Just to show who's boss, and to show how much they respect me, and to hope that maybe I won't bother to type it in, forcing them to find another excuse to keep pounding me with spam.
The importance of email in customer relations and branding
An email interaction with a customer is like a sales person's interaction with a customer, i.e., an opportunity to show the company at its best, to make a good impression and to act in a way that inclines the customer to spend money buying the company's products and services, now or in the future. If the customer says "no, I'm not interested right now," the effective sales person bows out in a way that maximizes the chances that, in the future when the customer has a need, they will be favorably inclined to the company.
What if the sales person says "I really respect you and I respond to your needs, but if you want me to leave your office, you have to write on this piece of paper your exact name and job title. If what you write fails to match the information I have in any way, even a single letter, I will continue to walk into your office uninvited and demand your time and attention." That's the physical equivalent of the email interaction I had with HP. How do you think this would work out if physical sales people did it? Is there any reason to believe that the quality of the reaction is different when the HP representative is email?
More and even worse
HP has just announced that it's splitting into two companies. Naturally, having ignored all my requests to be dropped from their email lists, HP emailed me about it. Not just some division; central, home-office HP. Here's what I received:
Note that the subject of the email is "separation information pertaining to email subscription." Thus, the home office of HP is still convinced I'm an email subscriber. And this email is about being a legitimate, opted-in subscriber to HP email.
Naturally, I was curious to see how they'd handle the unsubscribe request. I clicked on the link above and got ... nothing! For several hours I periodically tried, and the link led to a site that simply didn't respond. The next day I tried again, and got this page:
Again, I got that worst-practice of email unsubscription methods, the "we're making believe we don't have the email address that you clicked on to get here, so you have to guess to which of your potentially several email addresses we sent this and enter it correctly, otherwise we deem you insufficiently skilled to deserve being excused from being spammed by HP, and we will continue our periodic spam until you get it together."
That and a lawyerly "privacy" policy and five bucks will get you a coffee at the nearest Starbucks.
To all companies in the world anywhere that send email: take this as an example of what not to do. Your present and potential future customers sincerely request it, and will respond accordingly.
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