July 23, 2000
Article

Evite & Everyone.Net Commit Email Marketing Faux Pas

RSS   Free Newsletters  
SUMMARY: No summary available
After very quickly cutting out of Evite’s dot-com frat
party last week, we were miffed to find that they had taken
the liberty of signing us up for their services – three
times! Moreover, the signup notices we received had no opt-
out option. With three emails already received confirming
our forced membership, we wondered what ELSE we were in
for.

Not an hour later, we received a thank-you email for
attending the party last week – along with an unexpected
surprise. The note listed all the recipients in “CC”
instead of the “BCC” area! We were able to see the names
of everyone who had RSVP’d for the event. To add to the
folly, competitors eRSVP.com were among the recipients…so
now they have Evite’s key prospect list in their hot little
hands too. Lesson to Evite: don’t let your marketing
intern handle your email marketing program anymore!

In a related story, this Tuesday we were spammed not once
but three times by a “partner consultant” from
Everyone.net. The first was a mostly-blank shell note --
yes figuring out mail merge can be difficult! The old “cc”
vs. “bcc” bug bit the butt of the second email; we got the
form letter all filled out correctly … and we were amused
to see so did more than 200 of our fellow names-stripped-
from-Web-marketing-service-sites. The third, sent two
hours later simply contained a short apology saying, “Our
intention was that the email would go out to one
individual.” Would that be the royal “we?”, because we
thought just one guy at everyone.net screwed up.

Improve Your Marketing

Join our thousands of weekly case study readers.

Enter your email below to receive MarketingSherpa news, updates, and promotions:

Note: Already a subscriber? Want to add a subscription?
Click Here to Manage Subscriptions