I’ma marketing guy, so I’m ok with targeted spam. I get it. It’s hard for sale people to get good leads, so blasting the heck out of potential customers, with a relevant message, in hopes of stumbling across someone looking for your services, well that doesn’t offend me all that much.

And I’m even ok with auto-email programs that insert my company’s name into a generic email to make it look like they were specifically looking for me.

But the key word up there is, “relevant.”

Best described as, “opposite of relevant,” this email doesn’t make any sense at all.

“Subscription companies like University of Washington have a common issue, churn due to failed credit card transactions. Most of the time these failures happen at no fault of your customer.”

Well I had no idea. Thank goodness someone finally figured out the issue plaguing universities across the country – the students are churning out due to bad credit cards. I thought it was a decrease in state spending, an excessive amount of tenured professors or a drop in donations. Turns out it’s the credit cards. Who knew?!

It’s too bad I don’t know the person at the UW who is in charge of keeping all the parents’ credit cards on file. Seems like we could solve some real problems.

Addendum:

For example, here’s some spam that actually could be relevant.