An e-mail report arrived purporting to show how our agency profile "is doing" on an advertising industry database and went on to explain that we were currently recipients of their " Enhanced Agency Service" free of charge and not only did this afford the greatest exposure but they were proactively engaged in marketing our services using both online and offline channels. With great anticipation I scanned the report of visits to our page and click thrus to our site only to discover that despite all the great efforts apparently freely undertaken on our behalf, all figures were a big round zero. Ah! This eventuality was apparently anticipated and a zero return may be explained and rectified by updating our profile page. But guess what - there was no profile page or any mention at all of our agency on the site! This communication was presumably the output of some automated device and suggests that nobody had checked either the results which would hardly persuade us to actually pay for this service, or indeed if we were actually listed in the first case. This type of communication whilst posing as a personalised e-mail is actually less effective than a clearly widely broadcast message about a product or service. The main proposition that the owners of the database were selling was their enhanced listing so surely the first step is to provide some evidence that this has worked better than the basic free listing. This of course will take some time and human intervention, but should result in not only a genuine list of prospects but some understanding of how the 'trial' has performed. The new list will probably be shorter - if the rest are like ours a zero return it might instead prompt a review of the service itself - and better targeted. Relying on an automated system to generate sales misses the whole point of actually knowing who your customers and prospects are.
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