Want to see a real-life example of how not to use e-mail appending?
Pasted below is an actual appending attempt that arrived at one of our Yahoo! accounts recently from Hewlett-Packard.
“Dear Valued HP Customer,
“Our records indicate you would like to receive communications from HP via e-mail. To facilitate this, we need to confirm that [editor’s three-year-old son’s name]@yahoo.com is the best address to use for communications with HP.
“We recently matched this e-mail address to your postal mailing address so that you can receive valuable information such as support alerts, new service updates, warranty extension reminders, and helpful e-newsletters — all tailored to your registered HP product(s) and interests.
“Is [editor’s three-year-old son’s name]@yahoo.com your preferred e-mail address? If so, please visit www.hp.com/go/append/optin to confirm you would like to receive e-mail at this address.
“If you prefer to be contacted at a different e-mail address, please visit www.hp.com/go/append/newaddress to update your preferences.
“If you prefer not to receive HP communications via e-mail, please visit www.hp.com/go/append/optout and your name will be removed from our e-mail list.
“Thank you for being an HP customer!
“Sincerely,
“Hewlett-Packard Company”
First, we can’t recollect ever buying anything from Hewlett-Packard. Granted, it’s a huge company and may have some digital-widget division we don’t know about, but we racked our brains and can’t think of a single HP device in our home.
As a result, we certainly don’t consider ourselves HP customers and the company’s records can’t possibly indicate that we’d like to get HP e-mail.
Second, can this e-mail be any more eerily vague? Which postal mailing address did HP match this e-mail to? Home? Work? Is there a name attached to it? Is there any product-purchase history attached to it at all?
And even if we were HP customers, check out the offer: In exchange for permission to use the e-mail address, we get “valuable information” such as “support alerts, new service updates, warranty extension reminders, and helpful e-newsletters.”
Who came up with that offer? Nigel, the anti-social programmer in IT? Why not throw in “emergency recalls for dangerously defective products?”
For the record, this address was set up in an editor’s kid’s name to test what would happen if we opted into a co-registration database or two and then attempted to opt out of all the resulting e-mail. The address has never been associated with a single monetary transaction.
In a pleasant surprise, every marketer that included a physical name and postal address honored opt-out requests within the required 10 days.
However, spammers did get hold of the address and now the kid has more Viagra pitches, stock tips and loan offers in his spam folder than he can possibly respond to, that is once he learns to read and write.
And then HP pops up out of nowhere pretending to extend a relationship that doesn’t exist. This company’s marketing department should know better.
HP is the same company that is embroiled in a corporate spying-gone-wild scandal over unethical tactics aimed at finding out who leaked boardroom information to the press. HP-employed spies reportedly impersonated directors to get their telephone records. The company also reportedly sent surveillance programs in e-mail to reporters, and planned to infiltrate newsrooms with spies posing as cleaners.
Can HP get any creepier? And they call Microsoft the evil empire.
Hewlett-Packard has engaged in what has to be one of the clumsiest e-mail append attempts in the history of marketing.
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