How to lose prospective Business partners

Sat, 19 May, 2007 – 10:50 am

I've been receiving a newsletter from a firm called b2 which is a company not too far from here. I get a copy as an email account set up for Paul was signed up to their mailing list. Why? Because he once sent an email to someone there from it. Yes you read correctly, it seems that if you email this company your email address is added to their mailing list, regardless of whether their business is relevant to you or not! That's the first step on how not to treat your Business partners!

To explain further, David's business sold some hosting to this company for a client of theirs. His email address also receives the spam mails. My business email was used by mistake once during correspondence, but this company dealt with a completely separate business (denoted by the name!) than mine.

So I emailed them asking that my business domain be removed from their mailing list. They sell photocopiers and their marketing email is all about them and of course what they sell. It's irrelevant to me and it's bad enough with dealing with the spam I get. My email was pretty polite as far as I was concerned. It said

Please could you remove the address *****@3emedia.co.uk from your mailing list. This address was never signed up, your emails are of no relevance to my business and despite emails being sent to members of your staff and your marketing@ email (which just bounced back) your mails continue to be received.

I would appreciate it if you could do this immediately.

I felt it was pretty polite. I'm receiving spam from a company I never signed up with so I don't need to be all frilly around the edges. The response I got was from the original contact who had purchased the hosting. His email was

Hi Sarah,
I actually keep in touch with your company on occasion (though not for a while as I had forgotten about you), to give you leads when our customers require websites.

The reason why ****@3emedia was being used is that at one point we were using you to provide hosting for our companies and Paul is an old friend of mine.

I will email marketing now to try and break our companies affiliation.

What a childish response! First off, just because (in theory) you supply a service to a company doesn't automatically mean they get to sign you up to their marketing emails which are completely irrelevant to you. The last line was the clincher - "to try and break our companies affiliation". Riiiiiiiiight, so if you do business with this company and you no longer wish to receive their marketing emails suddenly your whole business agreement is broken? Wow, if i conducted business like that I'd never keep any clients!!

Fact is I never did do business with them as I don't sell hosting (I used to but I never sold hosting to them regardless). Also they have a reseller hosting account now, after falling out over having to pay a £25 invoice within the 30 days required (yes you read that right, they wanted 75 days), and they moved the only hosting client away to their own account. So therefore they broke the 'affiliation' if there was ever one anyway.

My reply to this was

Thanks for the reply however can I just point out that my business is 3.E.Media and not S2R Creations which is the business you should connect Paul to. Your company and I have never ever done business whatsoever, I don't sell hosting! You got Paul's email address as 3emedia.co.uk simply because he emailed from it one day by mistake, but my business is solely myself. David and Paul have their own business which is entirely separate.

I did email you the other month to request the removal and explained this but I guess it never got through.

Thanks in advance for removing 3emedia.co.uk from you mailing list.

It may not (or may) sound like it but I was pretty annoyed. I've been pulled into a situation that has had nothing to do with me. Whilst I could have just ignored the emails I was fed up of seeing them and I guess I'm easily wound up, so the more they came through the more I got annoyed. I realise that it's perfectly legal for a business to send spam to another business however I also think it's good practice to stop when the receiving business asks you to. I've sent a few emails in the past, all of which were ignored. Perhaps they never got through? Recent attempts have kept throwing the emails back so clearly their email system isn't that stable. However the guy's reply to me did wind me up. As already said, if you do business with this company a prerequisite to keep their business is to receive their marketing emails?

That's just plain ridiculous and is certainly not a way to keep your partners happy. Not that I've ever done business with this company but I can say for certain, I never will!

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