When Experts Screw Up

My local branch of the Business Marketing Association uses email to communicate with members and others interested in attending their events. That's smart. Unfortunately, they're not very good at it... and that's surprising, because it's an organization of marketing pros.

A few weeks ago I got an announcement of a special evening event via email. I couldn't make it to the event; I read the annoouncement, thought, "That sounds interesting, too bad I can't be there," and deleted the email.

Then, I got another email. And another. In fact, over the course of ten days, I got four absolutely identical messages. I stopped counting, but there were more after that - all exactly the same, except for the last one, which added some copy reminding me to register RIGHT NOW!! for the event.

Even more irritating, every time I opened one of these messages in Outlook, I got a message that they'd request a read receipt. I declined to send one. Intrusive, annoying, and unacceptable.

I want to be on their mailing list because I want to know about events. I actually replied to one of the messages asking if there was some reason they were sending me the exact same message every two or three days. No response.

Even worse: the email address in the message bounced.

If this is how a professional marketing association conducts itself, is it any surprise that so many companies manage to alienate and annoy customers with the email marketing?

I want to be on their list, because I want to know about events. But I'm tempted to just give up, because the stream of messages is just too much.

It's embarrassing when professionals do this bad a job. I have no idea who in the organization manages the email list, but I'm hoping to run into him or her at a future event, so I can politely comment on it.