By Sometimes you get an email and you just think… oh god no!
Particularly when that email comes from a big company.
This is the email I received yesterday…
When you look at this what do you think?
If you’re anything like me… spam!
Look at the FROM address: .box.cos.enquiries
I mean what the heck is that.
Then the content of the email starts with…
This e-mail, and any attachments are strictly confidential and intend…
Basically there’s no body copy except for a confidentiality notice.
Then, to make matters worse, there’s an attachment as well.
It doesn’t get more spammy than that.
I immediately went to hit the delete button, but then something someone said yesterday stopped me.
I opened it, and…
It’s a legitimate email from… National Grid.
That’s the UK wide provider of gas.
You don’t get companies much bigger than that. They’ve recently sold off a chunk (around 60%) to a private company, and so they’re being renamed.
Because we’re doing building work we’re dealing with the gas supplier and yesterday, when they came to do a survey, they mentioned there was a name change happening and we’d be notified.
But you expect to get a proper communication.
They’ve failed on every form of basic email communication.
To be honest, I’m surprised it even arrived in my inbox. I can only assume they have a deal with email service providers to make sure their emails arrive.
Take away from this…
1) Always have a proper FROM name, just using a website url does not work.
2) Never send an email with no body copy. Confidentiality information does NOT consititute body copy.
3) Don’t send attachments. There’s no reason the information in an attachment can’t be put into an email.
Over and out,
Michael
What do you think?