My new auto-reply to vendors

Dear Vendor Who I’ve Nev­er Spoken With,

Thank you for send­ing me your un­so­li­cited sales email. I only get about fifty of these a day. Yours is spe­cial. You have made my day! I re­spond to ap­prox­im­ately none of these types of mes­sages, so your odds of get­ting through to me are slightly bet­ter than a ra­bid squir­rel on Mass Ave dur­ing rush hour. Lucky you!

Here’s what you did that got my at­ten­tion:

  • In­sisted on a meet­ing ‘next week’ or ‘to­mor­row’, when you are ‘in town with your VP’. It turns out I have time free then, with noth­ing else to do!
  • Mangled the spelling on my name. I know, I know, “Remy” is far too tricky to get right. And call­ing me “Cus­tom­er” - very clev­er!
  • At­trac­ted my at­ten­tion with phrases like “Sur­plus Com­puters” and “Mean Time to Re­pair”. Those al­ways get me pretty ex­cited.
  • Sug­ges­ted a din­ner meet­ing with you and your fel­low sales crit­ters. Good call - I’ve been look­ing for ex­cuses to avoid my fam­ily more.
  • Im­bed­ded URLs in your mes­sage that tells your web serv­ers that I’ve read your email. That al­ways makes me feel good about how re­spons­ible your com­pany is. I will hap­pily dis­en­gage my Tro­jan de­tect­or just so that your mail can mon­it­or my move­ments for you.
  • For­war­ded, and then re-for­war­ded email that you sent me be­fore. I must have missed that one the first time. Play­ing on my guilt: good plan.
  • Wrote me a really, really long email. Thank you for giv­ing me some­thing to do with my black­berry while I’m bored when driv­ing on 128.
  • Shared an at­tach­ment with me! I kid you not - I don’t get enough of these. And open­ing up doc­u­ments from ran­doms is a great idea now that Of­fice is se­cure and re­li­able.
  • I’m par­tic­u­larly ex­cited that you have had a break­through! Most of your com­pet­it­ors only have rev­el­a­tions.

To im­prove your odds of get­ting through to me, I would re­com­mend you not in­clude the phrases “We­bin­ar or “Com­pli­ment­ary” in your sub­ject line. For some reas­on, my email sys­tem seems to file these auto­mat­ic­ally in the bit buck­et. Good thing the fil­ters in Lo­tus Notes aren’t any smarter!

Fi­nally, if you haven’t got­ten my at­ten­tion with any of these clev­er man­euvers, you may be out of luck. It would suck if you just..

  • Suc­cinctly and clearly told me what your product or ser­vice does
  • Told me how to find out more if in­ter­ested
  • Nev­er bothered me again

In that case, your note would be so bor­ing that I would prob­ably have to for­ward it to the per­son on my team who might be able to fig­ure out if your product would be valu­able to us.

How­ever, I’m sure you’ll nev­er do that. Too ob­vi­ous. Be­low you.

Look­ing for­ward to de­let­ing your next note!