Marketing and PR professionals - please get the basics right!

I thought I'd just share with my readers a little letter that I have just sent to another PR/Marketing company in response to an unsolicited marketing mailing that they sent me. I usually receive these kind of mailings warmly and with respect to the sender, but this person got the basics so wrong, that here is my response:

Dear Tony

You recently sent Pickle Jar Communications a letter introducing some of the broadcast services that you provide. You began your letter with the words ‘I know unsolicited mail can be a pain ...’. I am sorry to say that in this instance your letter was considerably more of a pain than unsolicited marketing mail usually is.

In fact, I normally receive marketing materials from other companies and show my respect for the time they have taken to write to me by reading the information and making a decision as to whether it is something I am interested in or not. I rarely discard such mailings without looking at them, instead treating them in the same way that I would hope my own marketing materials would be treated.

Your mailing, however, served only to waste my time. You made the very simple mistake of not putting enough postage on your letter which meant that instead I received a note from Royal Mail informing me that there was a letter awaiting me in the local sorting office for which I needed to pay an additional £1.15 because the sender did not pay adequate postage.

Not knowing what the letter was, and equally thinking it could be something important, I took the time out of my day to drive to the sorting office, pay the additional postage and collect the item. I’m sure you can imagine how annoyed I was to see that my efforts were purely for a piece of direct marketing mail.

I would really hope that a fellow PR and marketing professional would know better than to annoy a potential customer by making such a simple mistake. As such, I now enclose my invoice to claim back from you the cost of postage, half an hour of my time in lost earnings, and the mileage to collect this letter from the sorting office.

Yours sincerely

Tracy Playle MCIPR
Director, Pickle Jar Communications Ltd