Posts Tagged ‘Email marketing’

Greg, could I propose a partnership?

July 9, 2026

I get at least one of these emails a day from people I have never heard of.

The whole idea of someone you have never heard of reaching out to form a “partnership” is rubbish because this is the new word that they will use for selling a service into you.

90% of the time these emails are all about lead generation – they effectively will charge you a fee for randomly spamming businesses online with your service and thrashing your reputation in the process.

I wonder about the poor idiots who spend their time and energy creating email lists and firing off these meaningless emails to total strangers with little or no chance of success.

The most recent trend is that these emails all have an AI dimension to them, so let’s check out todays partnership offer …

Greg, Could I propose a partnership

Good morning Greg,

I’d like to put a partnership idea to you, around how AI can take over work that’s still done by hand.

Things like preparing proposals, reports or following up with clients still take hours, sometimes days. Today AI does most of this in minutes.

We’ve built automations that save teams more than 10 hours a week, time that goes back into the business.

If it makes sense, I’ll show you a concrete case of where AI would help most in your day to day.

We’re based here in Ireland, so it’s easy to work closely, in person too if that helps.

Would this be worth exploring? Do you have time for a quick call this week?

Kind regards,
Darlington Vincent
Ark Mind Tech

Hmmmm, a partnership?

I don’t think so!!

I will write back to him as an experiment and let’s see where it goes.

Dear Darlington,

A few points

  1. What list did you get my contact details from?
  2. This would not be a partnership – why do you think it would be?
  3. I would rather put pins in my eyes than write meaningless proposals using AI
  4. Work in person – would you like to pop down to Crookhaven in West Cork and we can have a cuppa to chat about your proposal?
  5. It would not be worth exploring if fairly sure.
  6. I’ll use the time instead to write a blog post about email marketing.

If you are going to use email marketing as part of your marketing outreach a few pointers

  • Research the audience you are sending your emails to
  • Say what it is and stop pretending it is a “partnership”
  • Turn cold calls into warm calls by gently connecting with your targets on LinkedIn
  • Quality is better than quantity

Yours sincerely.

Greg

I wonder what he will come back with?

Greg

Greg Canty is the Managing Partner of Fuzion, and Dead of the Digital Marketing Department.

Tags:, , , ,
Posted in Direct Marketing, Email Marketing, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Be first or be different!

October 16, 2015

last man

Most of the accountancy firms have it down to a fine art at this stage.

As soon as the budget is finalised the newsletters are prepared and issued, mostly by email. Years ago it would be the newspaper the following morning that we relied on.

This year it was no different and very shortly after Michael Noonan finished his budget speech the first e-newsletter hit my inbox with the main highlights.

Nothing too insightful – a summary of the main changes with a token commentary. As you would expect some of the information was relevant to me and some of it was totally irrelevant.

An hour later another e-newsletter hits my inbox from another firm – obviously the same info with nothing extra in terms of commentary or insights.

And then came another and another and after a while it felt like a long distance race where the winners were on their way home and a few well intentioned stragglers came struggling past the finish line.

I had a peep at all of them and except for style differences the content was as expected – virtually identical.

differentiation

Differentiating your business is really difficult in particular when there are many players doing pretty much the same thing. The first firm to produce a e-newsletter on the same day as the budget broke the mould.

When this happened they were seen as unique, very progressive and it was a great way of differentiating themselves – now many others have caught up so this advantage is gone.

The only way to stand out now is to either win the race (Quintas in Cork were the first to hit my email this year) or to do something totally different.

Next year how about getting all of the team ready, each with a list of their clients and prospects. Segment these by type and instead of winning the race why not take a little bit of time and where possible prepare a personalised, customised, more relevant email to each recipient.

This might seem like a huge challenge but with a few versions of the email (each with an emphasis on different topics) and with carefully segmented email lists every recipient could get something very relevant and more useful to them.

Maybe this is something just possible with 20% of the email database – one could send the 80% the generic email.

That’s something I have received from no one and definitely something I would consider to be really valuable and yes, it would make the sender standout…

No matter what you do if you can’t be first try to be different!

Greg Canty 

Greg Canty is a Partner of Fuzion PR, Marketing and Graphic Design, with offices in Dublin and Cork

Tags:, , , , , ,
Posted in Accounting, Communications, Creativity, Email Marketing, Marketing | Leave a Comment »