Alert: Just In Time For Father's Day - DadShop

I received a couple of marketing emails today. They were sent to two different emails. I’ve never heard of the business before.

My initial thought was this was spam and the company has possibly scraped my addresses from the web. But the problem is it is hard to know. According to the email I’m receiving the email because of one of the reasons they provide in the email.

You have received this email from DadShop because you could have subscribed via one of our network shopping sites or purchased from us before.

Personally I think it is a marketing mistake for a business to use email addresses collected via another business as there is no way of knowing if it is true and that creates distrust. I’d find it very hard to deal with this business given the amount of fraud that occurs on the internet.

I find some people I send emails to have simply forgotten that they’ve corresponded with me and in each case I’ve been able to let the person know what our discussion was about to assure them they’ve previously dealt with me. But I do keep in mind people are busy and we often don’t remember businesses we’ve contacted. An email out of the blue from an unknown business isn’t a good idea. If you bought a product from Woolworths and then received an email from DickSmith how would you feel. Even though they’re from the same group of companies we don’t expect our information to automatically transfer from one company to another.

I  checked the origin of the emails and they were from the United States. Again this is not unusual because they could be using a marketing service. I’d personally prefer to see emails being send from within Australia to add credibility to the emails.

A check of the domain name and the ACN number does not show up on the government’s ABN site. Neither does the company name appear.

 

At this stage I’d be concerned with using this site to purchase products and services. If you’re thinking of buying from a company you should be able to trace the company’s details to government registers to give you confidence in dealing with the business. Even if you can trace the business information to government databases it doesn’t mean it will be a good business to deal with, but at least you know they’ve gone through the required procedures.

As a general rule my approach is if you receive an email out of the blue that you don’t know I wouldn’t deal and I’d unsubscribe from their mailing list. The problem I find with people is they tend to be easily taken in from scammers and dealing with people you don’t know that you haven’t initiated is opening yourself up to being scammed.

If you’re sending out emails to others then consider how you’d react to your email if you received it. Put yourself in the recipients position and you’ll better understand how they’ll react and hopefully improve your response rate, or at least your recipients are less likely to be put off.

 

Kelvin Eldridge
www.JustLocal.com.au (An Online Connections service.)