No argument from me about what a waste of your time that email was. But I think it's greatest sin wasn't the lack of call to action or lack of personalization. I think its greatest sin was its lack of personality. It reads so….. Dry. Boring. There's a place somewhere between “overly formal” and “overly cutesy and smarmy” that firms need to find for their email communications.

The tools are there for companies to be personable: neglecting to use them is a waste of an opportunity. The “if you would like” is the oddest phrase to me. It wouldn't have taken that much time to make even a default email much better.

Not one single link in the email; doesn't that seem like a tremendous waste of the ability to measure the impact or response to the email?

For full context, my initial batch of images to Shutterstock were rejected (which is perfectly fine, even though Photoshelter had accepted all of them and featured a couple, I understand the markets they serve are different and will accept different images), and I had not returned since they were rejected. How about a mention of that? How hard would it be automate to pull data in my profile?

I still think it was all wrong :)

I wasn't disagreeing with you, just trying to emphasize what I thought was the biggest sin.

Here's what gets me about this: For all this talk about “joining the conversation”, I'm not sure there are many firms out there who have the slightest clue about how to have a conversation with a customer.

Understood completely…

I get a bit bemused by that sometimes. We know how to talk to people, right? And companies are just aggregations of people, right? Why do we have to create these levels of abstractions between people? If we were a customer, what would we expect?

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