On December 13th, my mailbox received four emails from a person claiming to be “Jarrod Harris” from a company called VisiStat. This company sells products with names like LeadCaster, AdCam, PageAlarm and Touch Mapping as per their website.
Here is the record of the emails that I received on that day from VisiStat:
The emails all were blindly addressed offering me the opportunity to resell VisiStat products. It would seem to me that VisiStat Inc. took the low road and purchased a screen scraped email list of websites that are in the SEO business.
Why did I come to that conclusion? Take a look at the email addresses that were addressed to me:
Do you see the pattern? All are “info” email addresses. All of these websites have words like “SEO” in the text. A website scraping program would identify my websites as SEO companies and then just send emails to the “info” address to hope that they get through.
Andrew Demske Responds
I sent an email to VisiStat to inform the company that I would be writing a post about their bad decisions for email marketing. A person named “Andrew Demske” responded apologizing for being bombarded and asked if I would send him a list of my email addresses to block.
Yeh Right! I’ll send a stranger a list of the hundreds of websites that I own or operate. Since “Andrew” was apologetic, I considered not writing about the sloppy email marketing practices of VisiStat.
Then on December 14, 2009 I received the SAME email from a “Scott Campagnolo” to one of the same email addresses listed above.
It was clear that VisiStat has a sloppy bulk email process in place. It may very well be that these people’s names are just ficticious. Why would two different salesmen send me emails to the same email address 24 hours apart?
More importantly, you have to ask yourself if this is the type of company you want to do business with!
When I sent another email to the company about Scott’s stock email, Andrew added this statement:
“we bought a list from a company and include OPT OUT language in the email so it is not illegal. We do see a very high conversion rate from these emails. “
This is just bullshit. These email addresses are all in a pattern and they are not used for “opt-in” marketing lists. VisiStat is sending out sloppy bulk emails with no respect for people who create “info” email addresses for real business.
I do invite VisiStat to provide proof that these email addresses were confirmed “opt-in” addresses. Just send the source and date that the persmissions were granted.
It’s a shame that VisiStat has decided to shit-bomb business consultants with crappy emails in the hope that 1-2% will respond and they will grow their business.
If you have received on of these form emails from VisiStat, send me a note.
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