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Backupify: a case study in incompetent marketing

Update: 2015-05-21 Backupify reached out to me and said that they had 2 different email addresses for me in their system, both have now been removed. I have not received marketing emails from them since. Thank you, Backupify, for looking into this matter.

A year or so ago I tried Backupify and then disabled it shortly after. Ever since I've received many emails from them, mostly warning that my disabled account was... umm.. disabled. Thanks for the reminder.

On April 17th I complained to them via their Zendesk system and their support agent Adam Deligianis explained the issue and cancelled the account. "I have now processed the cancellation of your account so you will not receive any more emails from us." (link)

This week I got more spam from them. This was was pseudo-personal message from Rob May, a SVP of Business Development, that states, "You are receiving this email regardless of your unsubscribe settings because it includes important information that impacts availability of your Backupify account."

If the account was cancelled, I'm not sure why I'm receiving this at all. Did Adam Deligianis lie to me? Did his management force him to lie? Or did Rob May dig deep into the database to spam people that don't even have accounts?

I've opened another (support request) asking them to investigate and not spam me in the future.

Here's the thing...

Backups are really critical. Doing backups right is all about attention to detail. I think every book I've ever written talks about this. Should you trust your backups to a company that lacks the attention to detail that Backupify has demonstrated in their marketing department?

This is one of those "everyone does it" kind of problems. Marking departments don't feel they have to care about spamming people because we (users) don't complain loudly enough. The marketing departments know that a single ops person complaining about too much email will be ignored when their CEO/CIO/CFO are trying to weigh the business costs and benefits of buying a backup solution.

Tom

Posted by Tom Limoncelli

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4 Comments | Leave a comment

Whats the problem of getting an extra email? Just delete it if you dont like it. I have been on the other fence and i know how hard it is to be a marketer and to achieve your objectives and stay on the job! Unfortunately in our world people dont have patience and respect any more!

Good question! The problem is that I was told I wouldn't receive more messages.

Hi Tom - thanks for alerting us to this issue. With several marketing systems running and talking to each other it's never our intention to spam anyone but occasionally an email gets through. We did some digging and it appears you were in our system twice with two different email addresses. We manually deleted you so that you will no longer be receiving any further communication from Backupify. I'm happy to answer any further questions you might have. Feel free to shoot me an email [email protected] Thanks again for your feedback.

Hi Sheila,

Thank you for the reply. I appreciate the special attention.

Tom

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