How To Sell Your Product To Bloggers Through Unsolicited Email

Update: As expected, I received a comment on this email, and I totally understand that mistakes happen. I’m fully ready to test this product out as soon as  it can work on WordPress.com Not sure why I got the email when I can’t even try it out yet.
I love getting email, I love it when people contact me. Unlike other bloggers who don’t care for people who read their blog, I at least try to reply to every comment. What I don’t like is people randomly “contacting” me to try their product without putting some effort. While I do encourage anybody with a product or service to contact me, when you do something like this, I can’t help but be a little bit saddened.

Dear Jeff,

I discovered your nice blog was linked to my blogging community.Thanks for your great posts.
As your blog is quite visible, I guess you must receive tons of messages!
I contact you directly today, because I believe your blog would be of great value in the AutoRoll Beta test we are running.

What’s all about? AutoRoll is the blog roll of your readers. It’s a widget that displays links to blogs your readers are visiting the most often.

How does it work? We trace the number of visits of each unique reader on each blog that has installed AutoRoll. The more often a reader visits a specific blog, the greater his affinity is with this blog.

What are the benefits for you? First of all, you will provide your readers with a very entertaining blog roll, based on other readers with similar reading habits. Moreover, you will get highly qualified incoming traffic for your blog. Indeed, as other similar blogs display your blog on their AutoRoll, they will feed you with new readers with a strong affinity with your blog.

It takes 1 minute to install: http://autoroll.criteo.com/

I would be really interested in your personal feedback on this widget.
Thanks for your help.
Regards,

Peter

Project Manager CRITEO

www.criteo.com

http://blog.criteo.com/

 

Okay, maybe saddened is a bit much. The point I am getting at is – I was lost at Jeff. I know all about people being contacted by Nigerian scammers, by companies asking you to try some product they have, some Web application, or offering money to digg a story to the front page of digg.com, or even want to pay to put a link in people’s forum signatures, but what we have here is an automated message, all they have to do is put the person’t name in and send it, and they couldn’t do that. I will not try out this service because of it.

 

Rather than complain, let’s take it a bit further, let’s see what really went wrong:

 

• Get blogger’s names right. If it’s a pseudonym, develop a way to get around it, like, “Hey there,” instead of “Dear Jeff,”. Also, while it’s not discouraged, there’s no real need to be formal here, just appropriate. You can be informal and very respectful.

• While the term “nice blog” is endearing in a “not really” sort of way, avoid this. Avoid sugar-coating things. You want me to try your product, so tell me. The same goes for “thanks for the nice posts” – it’s in-genuine and sounds like it.

• “I contact you directly today, because I believe your blog would be of great value in the AutoRoll Beta test we are running.” – We have a winner. This is what you want to tell a blogger, regardless of how many views the person’s blog is getting, or NOT getting for that matter, this is an effective way to make them feel nice.

• “What’s all about?….” – This is also good, tell us what the product is, I don’t want to be approached by email and then have to figure out what your product is. I am your customer, make me feel comfortable.

• “How does it work?” – Also good, especially for something involving putting code on someone’s website.

• The rest of the email is actully pretty good, but there is no shame in saying we are approaching bloggers to enter into the beta for a product – just don’t lie.

• Use words such as exclusive and first. Remember that people like feeling exclusive as well – it’s a beta but looking at the site, anyone can sign up. Include a special code to gain access and make it really special.

I was “approached” by the company for feedback, and I wrote this post with the intention of giving none, but I was wrong, I did just that – how to properly market your product to bloggers through unsolicited email. An honest mistake or an automated spamming? Who knows. The product looks a bit interesting, but I now refuse to test it.