Comedian of the week ... He-e-e-e-r-e's Patrick!

Email marketers, doncha love 'em?

Step forward, Patrick McGlone of cvent.com who sent me the following quite astonishing message, headed (unbelievably):

Lunch Seminar - Best Practices for Event Management, Web Surveys and Email Marketing

This strikingly imaginative heading was followed by Complimentary lunch seminar and then a rather curt greeting:

Charles, (Er, who?)

I hope all is well at Drayton Bird Associates Ltd. Cvent has enjoyed having you as our customer and we look forward to continuing to work together in the future. We are very excited for the upcoming year, as we will be releasing several new products and services.

As a valued customer, we'd like to invite you to a complimentary Cvent luncheon and product seminar in Greater London. While this is primarily a sales presentation, hundreds of our existing customers have attended and told us that these product seminars have helped them to discover new product features and enhance their use of the Cvent system.

So this is best practice?

Apart from the way they are so excited about what's happening to them - a sort of corporate masturbation, because who gives a shit ...

... I have never heard of Cvent. If I have ever done business with them, I can't recall it. And they certainly don't know me, because my name is Drayton. In fact just to help out cretins we call our firm Drayton Bird Associates.

This all prompted me to wonder what worst practice might be. Could it be starting messages with something more creative, like "Hello, Fuckwit"?

Anyhow, this majestically useless piece of incompetent drivel (which they sent me not once but three times) ends with the following dangerous suggestion: Also, please do not forget about Cvent’s Referral Program! If you refer a colleague or associate to us and they become a Cvent client within 6 months, we will extend to you a £125 reward of your choice.

No doubt this inspired approach to the concept of best practice gets plenty of mugs to come along, but to me it looks like spam, and I am trying to think of three marketers I really hate ...

For instance there is a man called Paul Liesching who ripped us off big time a couple of years ago with a thing called Teddiphone ... but he's too smart to fall for this, I'm afraid. He was certainly too smart to pay us what he agreed.