New big thing in email: automated re-sending until answer received

New email startups popping up to piss off the Average Joe

We recently learned of a new startup called Rebump, a service that re-sends your email to a recipient until they finally respond, which in theory sounds like a great follow up strategy for the busy professional, but as a high volume email recipient, it sounds like the Second Layer of Dante’s Inferno (second only to having your eyelids taped open, your body duct taped to a chair, being forced to watch nothing but footage of Justin Bieber for all eternity).

Alex Wilhelm and Josh Constine describe it perfectly. “So, Rebump is essentially a brilliantly passive aggressive way to force people into responding to you, or the flood of notes will not fucking stop.”

It appears that it sends the same pushy email over and over until the recipient threatens to kill you, or they finally respond and end the torment. Way to be personable.

But that’s not the only startup spreading its wings

Perhaps you’re like me and you think the idea is atrocious (the theory is great, but the annoyance level is going to create a lot of insta-enemies in the world). Perhaps you think, well, that is neat, but at least it’s only one startup.

Wrong.

There is also a product in beta called Polite Persistence which offers a similar function of re-pinging people over and over again until they respond, and while this service lets the sender tailor each follow up email specific to the recipient and how many emails have already been sent to them, and it too stops emailing when the recipient finally responds.

Want to know how I know about this startup? They committed a rookie PR mistake and emailed a form letter to every single staff member here, as if we don’t communicate or in most cases, sit near each other, and two staffers have already been the target of round two of the generic emails.

Look, email marketing is tough

Although for a brief time, the world thought social media would trump email, email marketing still reigns, and getting your brand read inside of an email is one of the best tools around. Still. And it’s hard, because we’re all fighting for consumers’ attention. These re-sending services are appropriate for a handful of industries, but for most scenarios, we’re not sold.

Email marketing is competitive, but that’s no reason to get so lazy that you’re willing to piss people off. Take it from someone who is notoriously persistent, these email startups are poised to piss people off. Yes, you may increase the number of responses you get, but they’re very likely to include the words “go” and “away.”