Let loose the Dogs of War, eh well Puppies at least.

LVM [Large Volume Mail] Campaign – As before the marketing department are once again tasked with turning Water into Wine with another data list of tripe. I’m sorry to say I have now done this exercise on a few occasions now and I’m still not confident that the Golden Rule, the physical laws of data management have been discovered to be wrong, that equation being ‘GIGO’ – Garbage In Garbage Out. Handing us over 5 million emails of the UNDEAD is about as effective as it gets, when a data provider tells you that his lists are cleansed and regularly checked. Its like the opening of a new coffee jar – when you break the seal you get that lovely aroma – Ah! This is good data, we’re onto a winner with this, sure of it, how quickly does that smell disappear.

Okay, we have the e-mail addresses in a .csv file and uploaded them to our email provider. Well at least 2 hours later we had uploaded them. Quick note here, it was the first time we had taken it upon ourselves to distribute our email campaign with our own systems. This way we could validate the quality of the data that had been provided to us by the data warehouse and just see how badly our asses were BLACKLISTED.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing – yes? I personally had taken it upon my shoulders to be the recipient of the replies from this campaign. My Outlook rules where set up to segment off all possible replies that we may receive from half an million email addresses – Yeah right. I had spent some time setting up folders for ‘Out of Office’, ‘Automated Response’, ‘Vacation’, ‘Unsubscribe’, ‘SPAM’, ‘BULK, ‘GET A LIFE’ and so on. I felt that putting in the effort here we would have control of the project and IN taking this batch approach we will find gold in them thar hills’.

Tuesday [believed to be one of the 3 best days to email for mass mailings] 10:00 am [also about the best time]. One of our online marketing executives, sitting in wet anticipation, had his jittery finger poised over the send button. ‘Wait for it...’, 9:58 am, Sweat beads starting to appear, ‘Wait for it...’, 9:59am . Okay bite bottom lip. ‘LAUNCH TORPEDO!!’. Suddenly there was a gush and a flush and they were off.

For the next ten minutes, we looked at the ceiling in still quietness, nothing seemed to be happening...

...see next entry, if its there we survived.