So Coke’s been running this competition thing where you enter the codes you get off coke bottles onto their website, gain points for prizes. Usual sort of thing.
On a whim, I signed up. I was careful to select the ‘no marketing emails please’ option. I then promptly forgot about it (as you tend to) and didn’t enter any more label codes.
Today I get an email which says:
Then down the bottom, in the teeny tiny print, it has this disclaimer:
*This is a service message containing information about your ‘Coke Zone’ account. It is not a marketing message. *
More than a bit cheeky, and I would say dishonest to boot. Maybe they’ve deluded themselves, or maybe they’re lying, but calling it a “service message” does not change the fact that it’s a message marketing their promotional e-mails.
No company in the history of the universe has ever thought that it has sent out junk mail, emailed spam or made unsolicited phone calls. All of these are things the company knows for a fact that you actually wanted all along and so of course will be appreciated.
Yep, because if you really didn’t want to hear from them, you obviously wouldn’t have given them your email address.
This is what free email accounts are for. There are companies that I want to communicate with (or who required it), via email. They don’t get my main email address. They get an email address that I can abandon every couple of years, when the spam gets too bad.
I NEVER use my ISP account when I sign up for anything or join anything unless I know its a non spam area. I have a hotmail acoount with really good junk filters and let everything go there instead;)
I get ticked with the Coke site and things they require too. Receiving that email was marketing pure and simple. It’s like in the past when you told the telephone companies to put you on the do not call list and they still called because you were a customer and upgrading you had to do with a current contract so they could call you by their logic. Never mind you told them to leave you alone. Send corporate headquarters a complaint. You’ll see if they care or not by the response. Some places are very responsive to complaints.