Awful marketing

What ever happened to honesty and integrity? I know, I know, I am asking a rhetorical question, but two recent incidents really got me thinking.

By now, you all must have heard of the Equifax data breach. At least 143 million names, birthdates and social security numbers were stolen by hackers getting into Equifax. Now this happened from May 2017 to July 2017. Equifax didn’t make this fact public until mid-September. Equifax executives also sold stock just before they made the breach public. Need I say more?

As soon as I heard about this, I went on to all three credit agencies and checked my credit reports. So far, so good.

Well, low and behold a few days ago, I got an email from Equifax. The gist of it went something like this:

“Dear Nancy,

We know you are concerned about your credit rating. We’d like to offer you some additional steps to help your peace of mind.

Blah, blah, blah. And these features will only cost you $12.99 per month.”

WHAT????? Due to Equifax’s negligence, they are now offering me a chance to deal with that by giving them more money? I tell you, my blood pressure must have gone up 30 points after I read that email. What an awful way to treat people.  To make matters worse, I keep getting marketing emails from them.  Each email is trying to sell me a different service.  Ugh.

The other incident wasn’t quite so dramatic, but it still annoyed me. I am not very active on Twitter. (Side note: I still don’t get this “tweeting” business.) But, if someone follows me and their profile looks interesting, I will follow them back. This happened recently. All of a sudden, I am getting messages from this person, offering free trials of his company’s software. I don’t connect with people to hear all about their company’s products. So, this person has been “unfollowed.”

What about you? What experiences of awful marketing have you had recently?

Skeleton photo from Pinterest B2B Email Marketing.