Don’t forget to introduce yourself!

I recently participated in an email promotion for a new book launch which was interesting to do – I have plans for a similar process for my book when it gets into Amazon in a month or so.

Yesterday I received an email from someone I’ve never heard of to promote a book written by someone else I’ve never heard of and when I emailed them to find out how I got on their list, they advised I’d participated in the launch I mentioned above and they thought I’d like to participate in their’s too.

I promptly wrote back and suggested they should have introduced themselves and explained how I came to be on their list – rather than just launch into their promotional spiel without so much as a ‘hi, I’m xxx and I found you…’

When you build lists of email addresses it is really important that you don’t add people to your list unless they’ve given permission. The fact that I’d participated in someone else’s launch along with several other people I don’t believe qualified me to be added to the lists of all the other participants, but even if it did, it would be nice for them to actually explain how and why I came to be on their list. Heavens, I’d not thought to go and add all those people to my list – perhaps I should have!

Maybe it’s old school thinking but I like people to introduce themselves before they push their wares – otherwise I’m inclined to ignore them or block them at my spam filter – which is what I nearly did with these people. What do you think?

By the way – if you’re interested in participating in my Amazon book launch, then I’d love to hear from you – you will be put on a list specifically for that purpose and given full details once I have them.

Kathie Thomas

Kathie is the former owner of VA Directory and is former past President of the Australian VA Association. She founded the Virtual Assistant industry in Australia in the mid 90s, having already been operating a home-based secretarial service. Today the VA industry covers a multitude of office-based services for clients worldwide.