Easy Lead Riches Mirage

I recently got spammed by an American email marketing outfit. One of their three main strands is described by their web spiel thus;

The days of batch and blast email marketing campaigns with low response rates are over. To convert raw inquiries into sales ready leads, modern marketers need to develop a dialogue with prospects.

How, you wonder, do they practice what they preach? Here’s a copy of True Influence’s mail to me, from their CEO.

You may know us as the marketing automation software but I am contacting you about something very different.

As the Chief Executive Officer with your company, you seem to fit the profile for a partnership in our pay-per-click email prospecting platform which is used by companies such as VistaPrint, The White Pages, Tech Data and MetricStream to name a few.

I’m curious to discover whether there might be a good fit between our companies and, if nothing else, we can share some ideas and connect for the future.

Let me know when you are available to discuss.

I couldn’t believe what I was reading. Try as you might to applaud it, there’s absolutely nothing about this that in any way suggests a winning approach to lead generation. What a complete waste of time.

Naturally, the practitioner themselves will undoubtedly point to zooming response rates from their fishing, but it is hard for me to see how the style evident above could possibly render anything higher than false Nigerian prophesiers.

Yes, I realise I could be that one outlier that mischievously crept in to their data set and all that, but this misfire goes deeper, doesn’t it? I’d love to reward email marketeers for solving an ill of the maligned heavy duty b2b lead hunt process, but I continue to frustratingly surmise that such activity is a poor investment.