Bad Email Practise!

It is recommended practise that when contacting people by email for the first time you provide an 'opt in' to future emailers rather than an 'opt out'. Whilst not all companies follow the practise almost all do at least provide a simple 'opt out' or unsubscribe option.

One publishing house seems to have taken a different route - it appears to create a new emailing list for every emailer it sends. Each emailer it sends me has the facility to unsubscribe but I still receive another emailer from them most weeks - and then have to unsubscribe from this list.

Whilst the publishers may think they are being very clever, in my view this is extremely poor practise and does nothing for the image of the business or to encourage me to read their emailers. Indeed I now normally delete them or mark them as spam without reading and don't bother to click on the unsubscribe as it appears to have no effect.

Do you have any other examples of poor emailing practise?

Where have all the IT companies gone?

A phone call from a prospective new client last week led to a discussion on where have all the mid-sized, generalist IT companies gone to.

When I entered this business 20 years ago names such as ISTEL, Systems Designers, Scicon, Logica and Hoskyns were all significant players in the UK market. Now they have all disappeared, with the exception of Logica which has grown substantially through acquisition, as they have been acquired and become absorrbed within major corporations.

I then began to consider the implications of this for customers - where do they go to if they don't want to to deal with the likes of IBM, EDS, CapGemini or Accenture? There are clearly vertical market and application specialists but few generalists of a significant size appear to exist.

Do you have a view on how the market has changed and who are the rising stars - if so I would be delighted to hear from you