Marketed At vs Marketed To

“You seem to have inadvertently subscribed me to some marketing bullshit without my permission. I don’t think I want to be a LinkedIn connection with you any more. Goodbye.”

Which inevitably has a reply along the lines of:

“I accidentally exported the wrong address book.”

“Mailchimp Outlook plugin subscribed all of LinkedIn contacts without my say-so.”

“That was my assistant.”

“I didn’t realise I’d done that.”

The range of reasons why I wound up on someone’s marketing newsletter is mind-boggling, but every time they’re sorry: “it was a mistake, I wasn’t too blame.”

Then there are those people who are taken aback that anybody would ever consider not wanting whatever it is being pandered.

“Most people welcome my newsletter.”

“You can just click the unsubscribe button.”

Then there is the downright angry…

“Well you don’t need to be an asshole about it.”

“I wouldn’t want to connect with someone like you anyway.”

The thing is, it isn’t for you to decide how someone spends their time and attention, and if you cannot respect that, people won’t care about you, your product or your service.

People aren’t connecting with you on LinkedIn to be subscribed to your newsletter without their consent.

They’re connecting to another human, and the interpersonal communication that comes with that contact.

If your marketing consists of adding people to a database to be marketed too the moment you get their contact details, you’ve automatically lost the edge.

You might think you’re winning based on the size of the subscriber list, but in reality, the majority of the people don’t care what you have to say, and probably think less of you for saying it without being asked.

All those people who are sending your newsletter to their spam folder?

They’re costing you money each month.