Because I’m senior enough to have “spending authority,” an unfortunate fact of life for me at work is that I get a lot of cold sales emails. Most of them I just delete or report as spam, but occasionally I get one that is so ridiculously bad or offensive that I feel I must address it.
This email from AT&T Fiber is such a one:
Let’s dissect the myriad things that are wrong with this email, shall we?
Subject: AT&T Service Consultation ** Meeting Request ** Hope you had a great weekend!!
No unsolicited business email sent to a stranger should ever include the sentence “Hope you had a great weekend” or any variant of it, such as “Hope you had a fabulous weekend” included later in this email. Ditto for “Happy Monday!” And exclamation points are also right out, let alone the double exclamation point we see here.
12:28 AM
Don’t send unsolicited business emails in the middle of the night. Just don’t. There are lots of different options for scheduling your emails to be sent at a reasonable time. Heck, I even wrote one of them.
Hello! 😊
Smiley faces do not belong in professional emails. Not in the salutation, and also not in the signature, where the author of this email also put one.
I reached out to you over the weekend
Yup, you did, you emailed me at 8:18 PM on a Friday night, which is outside of normal business hours even in Texas where you’re supposedly located, so see above.
Also, I don’t think even one cold sales email is OK, though I try to tolerate them. However, more than one is never OK, and more than one in four days is definitely, absolutely, positively never OK. I know they teach you different in internet sales school. They’re wrong. Every sales email I get from a vendor makes me less likely to want to buy from them.
I didn’t actually see the message you sent me on Friday night, since Gmail correctly rated it “blatant spam” and put it straight into my Spam folder; I went looking for it there while writing this blog posting. I will resist the urge to also dissect everything that was wrong with your first email. One thing, however: while I can’t speak for everyone, I can assure you that it does not make a good impression on me when a stranger emailing me for the first time puts a head shot in their email signature. Now, back to this bad email…
to discuss what is top of mind for your organization.
Oh, the jargon! It hurts, it hurts!
We ,AT&T have realized that technology needs and requires have increased due to the pandemic of CO-VID 19.
There are three obvious errors in this one sentence.
When is the best time to discuss your Interent
Another error.
If you need immediate assitance
Another error.
Have a blessed day!!!
Religious language is not appropriate in professional correspondence with strangers, and as noted above, neither are exclamation points, let alone triple exclamation points.
Maybe learn how to send emails without broken image links in them?
This whole email is just embarrassing.
