I have found myself writing about the risks of relying on AI to actually be intelligent quite a bit in recent months.
Call me cynical, but I have become increasingly frustrated at the apparent outsourcing of creativity and, crucially, attention to detail that AI facilitates. In the right hands, AI is a magnificent tool and can be very powerful.
Unfortunately, all that glitters is not gold and I am sure that I am not alone to cringe when (very important) first impressions are shattered by unfortunate outputs of what is clearly an automated process.
I wanted to share one recent example that demonstrates this point. I am not going to name the sender as, quite frankly, I do not think that they deserve any credit (?) for their outreach campaign but this is an email that I received on a Friday:
Doing the job that I do and understanding how these platforms work, I assume that the clever little AI bot looked at my LinkedIn profile and devised an irresistible message that would attract my attention.
I don’t really know where to start with my analysis of why this is such a disastrous email. I don’t think that there is anything that makes me want to find out more and my only reaction is that of making a mental note to avoid the sender like the plague.
‘Your Bristol degree taught you how to build strategies’? No it didn’t. I did a French degree and I can confidently say that it has ZERO relevance to anything that I do at a digital marketing agency. I get it, you are trying to personalise the email and pretend that you have spent some time looking at my personal history but my hackles are immediately up.
You then tell me how my ‘overhead costs’ are eating 60% of my margins whilst our competitors scale to 100+ clients with half our team size. Totally meaningless numbers that are plucked out of thin air to try and sound credible. But it doesn’t feel credible and there is no way in a month of Sundays that I would want to have 100+ clients with half our team size. That simply is not an aspiration that we have. You have managed to show a fundamental lack of understanding of what we stand for at Browser Media.
Arguably the peak of my despair arrives with the glorious ’10 minutes = Custom Bristol sweatshirt + we’ll show you….’ sentence. What on earth are you talking about and what are you actually offering? Please stop the obsession with Bristol as that was over 30yrs ago…
To be honest, I didn’t actually read any further than this and just sighed at yet another example of incredibly lazy marketing. Great, you probably managed to send a trillion emails that day but I ask myself how many people would have been glad to receive such gibberish?
Unsurprisingly, my total silence didn’t take me out of the particular cadence of email spam and I received the inevitable follow up a few days later:
Again, I am really struggling to know where to start with my abject hatred of this email.
Ignoring a sweatshirt that I don’t want, the ‘But your delivery capacity aren’t getting better on their own’ is a particular low point. Grammatically incorrect (I am a bit OCD on that front), it is also totally meaningless. I am guessing that you are trying to sound wise but it simply falls flat and smacks of AI generated drivel.
You then promise me an 80% client retention. Being blunt, we would be mortified if we were losing 20% of our client base as that would suggest fairly shoddy work. Perhaps it is your chronic lack of attention to detail and, I am assuming, an absence of human sense checking?
Once again, I really couldn’t be bothered to read much more or give it any real consideration beyond fuelling my frustration at the tidal wave of incredibly low quality spam that is facilitated by supposedly clever AI platforms.
Of course, I wasn’t off the hook and received yet another email despite my silence:
Last call on the Bristol? What wonderful personalisation… For your reference, we are not operating at capacity and I challenge you to prove that all our competitors are growing as a result of white-label partnerships.
Joking aside, I do (sort of) understand the intention of this campaign and the underlying concept of enabling growth through solving recruitment headaches definitely has some merit, but I just find this execution so depressingly poor.
It is not entirely AI’s fault as the ultimate responsibility must lie with the operator (remember – AI is an amazing tool, but you still need to know how to use the tool…). I suppose it is possible that this particular email sequence was checked by a human. If that is the case, then we definitely would not want them going anywhere near any of our client work, but I suspect that it was yet another example of a focus on cheap rather than quality. I have already shared my feelings on that front.
Getting email right is incredibly hard. Getting it wrong is therefore fairly easy. Getting it as wrong as this particular example is quite an achievement. I very much doubt that they would achieve an 80% client retention rate if this is how they start a conversation?