DeliverabilityList management

Getting in trouble due to Emily’s bad reputation

By September 12, 2014 No Comments

Getting in trouble due to Emily’s bad reputation

I had a hard time last Friday. In fact, it all started before, when my friend Emily sent me one among many other emails. I’m sure you do have an Emily in your life. She’s lovely. But she’s painful. She continuously sends us stuff. All kinds of stuff: jokes we’ve read 10 times, ‘REALLY CUTE CAT PICS’, etc… It looks like she just can’t control herself when it comes to the Forward button.

On Facebook, I muted her. By email, I just don’t bother to open her stuff anymore.

Which is where the problem began.

She sent me a message about our friend Lizzie’s bachelorette party. Hoping I would help her to organize the event.

I didn’t open it. In fact, I didn’t even take a look at it. Click > directly in my garbage bin.

At one point last week, another friend just popped-up on my chat window and asked me, unhappily why I didn’t reply to Emily. “Don’t you want to help organize the party?” I’ll spare you the details about how I diffused the situation and sorted things out with Emily to save our friendship. Not to mention my other friends who were angry with me for “not wanting” to help Emily… We had a cool party but Emily’s still a bit mad at me. Moreover, she doesn’t understand that she’s part of the problem.

If my friend Emily would have had a good “sender reputation”, like for example, my friend Mireille who is always sending me crazy cupcake recipes she knows I will crave, or my friend France who is always sending me relevant professional information that I’m interested in, I would have opened those emails! I would have known they come from someone who is usually sending me interesting/relevant/exciting content I’m happy to receive.

Emily would be a bad email marketer. She sends anything, and everything, all times to all her list of friends. She doesn’t try to keep us interested by sending content that interests us. If she would listen to her friends a bit, she would keep her tips and quizzes for her old aunties who love to read that kind of… Or at least, who have more time than I do.

Unfortunately, there is no unsubscribe link at the bottom of her “FWD: 10 tricks to lose weight easily” emails. I’m sure you don’t want your clients to look for it desperately when you send them some emails. Think of it when you prepare your next email. Are you an Emily?

Author Isabel Lapointe

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