I may or may not have snapped this morning after twice being the victim of an unnamed marketing firm’s arbitrary email spamming practices – once with the original spam, then again with a “follow-up” spam two days later inquiring if I still might be interested in the original spam, despite my reply, clearly asking them to remove me from their email list.

Then I may or may not have written the following reply, which I may or may not have sent to the Assistant Account Executive in question and copied her entire senior management team.

I may or may not be a little crabby.
………………………………………………………………….

Hi [redacted]!

Hope all is super well. Thanks for following up on your message from two days ago! :)

It appears there’s been a teensy email mix up here. My records show that I, in fact, responded to your achingly misdirected email regarding holiday travel with children at precisely 12:05pm on November 1st – roughly five minutes after it was received. Being that your firm negligently does not include an ‘unsubscribe’ link in your marketing spam emails, my only recourse was to reply to your email, change the subject line to “REMOVE” and, in case there was any confusion, include a short, kindly note asking you to please remove me from your distribution list. I’ll paste the message below:

“Please remove me from this distribution list.

Thank you,

Leif”

I did this, chiefly, because as any casual visitor to my blog will confirm – by ‘casual’, I’m referring to anyone that’s spent more than zero seconds perusing my blog (i.e. not you) – the only time I blog about travel with children is when they scream and cry and raise hell while sitting next to me on trans-Atlantic flights. And on those occasions, rather than, as you suggested, constructively offer ways the parents might have entertained their children so as not to disrupt 25 sleeping people, I usually fill this space by openly musing about the number of undiagnosed strokes and serious head injuries in the family’s recent ancestry.

I also did this because, in addition to your firm’s utter failure at the aforementioned lack of including an ‘unsubscribe’ link in your marketing spam (which, I shouldn’t have to explain to you, is all but mandatory these days), you seem to have failed/disregarded another base principle of marketing: targeting. See, if you take a little time to “target” your marketing spam email, not only will you likely get better results from your marketing spamming efforts, but you also won’t enrage and alienate the same bloggers you’re hoping will provide you with free exposure – and inspire them to fire off lengthy, sarcastic (yet oddly cathartic) missives after a hard night of drinking and election disappointment.

If you take the targeting step out of the marketing equation, you’re technically no longer marketing. You’re just sending random emails to tons of inappropriate people, historically known as “spamming”, much like I’m demonstrating with this message. Being that you apparently don’t read your incoming emails, I needed to find another avenue to make contact with your organization. Instead of taking a few moments to figure out who exactly in your organization should be receiving this rant, I’m just sending it to every email address I found on your website. So, using your interpretation of the concept, I am now also marketing, with, I can only assume, a similar degree of success.

In the future, I strongly recommend that you:
1.    Read your emails
2.    Carefully internalize the content of those emails
3.    Act accordingly
4.    Have lunch with a blogger and get informed about the basic dos and don’ts of sending inappropriate marketing spam to bloggers, before you burn anymore bridges

Let me know if you’re interested in having me further instruct you on the nuances of marketing to bloggers and/or hints at successfully utilizing email as communication tool.

Oh, and perhaps it bears repeating, please remove me from this distribution list.

Best,

Leif