Are you the target of tag-team email marketing?

March 29, 2023 7:18 AM

Do you receive a marketing email from Person A at Company X, followed an hour later by one from Person B at Company X who purports to be Person A's supervisor and who is "following up"? This is one of the more stupid and irritating schemes I have seen. Are there actually so-called "marketing consultants" who are recommending this approach? (Not seeking advice on responding. I have that handled.)
posted by John Borrowman to Work & Money (10 answers total)

Yes, I've been seeing this from some content vendors lately. (I'm a librarian. I'm not a collection developer, though -- I don't even buy library materials!) Clearly somebody thinks it's a good idea.

It causes me to put the entire domain in my email bozofilter. Buh-bye, annoying spammers!
posted by humbug at 8:18 AM on March 29, 2023

I get this. Usually they also say they’re following up on some prior contact that they claim I’ve had with them. They go straight in the bin, obvs.

Those messages do sometimes look relevantly similar to a bunch of others that you might get legitimately, from someone who’s chasing you about that thing you spoke about a couple of weeks ago. So, i can see why they work on a non-zero number of recipients. And the marginal cost of sending each additional spam email is effectively zero. So it probably makes sense in someone’s bullshit economic model.
posted by Puppy McSock at 8:57 AM on March 29, 2023

Yup. I signed up for a trial of something and within an hour received an email from someone from the company asking me about licenses. That was followed within a day by another person in their company and then by a third. I think they've emailed me like seven times in a week. They are now all in the spam filter and I deleted my trial account and will spend my time discouraging people from using their tool - which isn't great anyway!
posted by urbanlenny at 8:57 AM on March 29, 2023

Yup just got one yesterday. I used to get the increasingly harassing emails “hey! I emailed you last week and you still haven’t replied!” But those have decreased lately. I figure it’s scam.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 9:04 AM on March 29, 2023

They're trying to defeat you having blocked the sender of the first email; a second one from a different sender might sneak by.

Like all spam, its goal is just to get in front of as many eyes as possible on the off chance 0.0001% of recipients bites, it's not meant to persuade you, only to get you to read it more than once.
posted by AzraelBrown at 9:19 AM on March 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

Also, they are all the same sender, and none of these people actually exist. Really, try running their names through linkedin.
posted by mochapickle at 9:49 AM on March 29, 2023

Best answer: FWIW, I am in sales and literally everyone hates literally every email marketing approach ever used by anyone ever.

The only three reactions to email marketing are:

1. ignore/delete
2. complain about it
3. grudgingly reply if it corresponds with a short term need

The payoff from #3 makes #1 and #2 irrelevant. It's rare, but email is easy, so.

People do not like marketing emails. But until/unless someone comes up with a better way for B2B companies to connect, it will exist. I, for example, work for a positively enormous company that you may be using right now but almost certainly have never heard about. We do not sell to consumers or advertise and our products are specifically built to escape notice. I have to reach out to people I do not know to advise them we even exist and may be in a position to legitimately help them. They often hate this. I hate doing this. The best I can do is make my emails short.

It is not of course, literally true that no one ever responds positively to a marketing email. It happens sometimes. People also win the lottery and get struck by lightning. Most of the interactions I have had via email, even those that resulted in sales, began with at least mild annoyance on the contact's part.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:54 AM on March 29, 2023 [5 favorites]

I've been getting, "just following up on my email" spam for years. Recently I've also started getting, "just following up on my subordinate's email" spam. Do they actually send an email from the purported subordinate first? How sophisticated! I guess my delete twitch is fast enough that I hadn't noticed.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 9:55 AM on March 29, 2023

Best answer: Should have added to the above: because people do not like email marketing, they condition themselves to ignore it. As a consequence, those of us in sales who are good at our jobs come up with different tactics. We are aware that you will hate those as much as you hated previous tactics, but if, because the tactic is new, the rate you ignore us at is even incrementally lower than before, it counts as a win.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 10:05 AM on March 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: We are aware that you will hate those as much as you hated previous tactics, but if, because the tactic is new, the rate you ignore us at is even incrementally lower than before, it counts as a win.

So well said. Thank you.
posted by John Borrowman at 12:14 PM on March 29, 2023 [1 favorite]