Sit back while I tell you a little story. A little over a year ago I need to get news glasses. Since I hadn’t had my eyes checked in a while I figured it was time for a complete vision exam too. Trying to make my life easier since I was going to be in the mall anyway, holiday shopping time you know, I went to the optician attached to the eye glass store at the mall. Everything went well. My checkup went quickly, the doctor was friendly, they took care of filing for insurance, and I was a happy camper. I then took my prescription to the glasses counter, picked out my frames, and I was on my way.

Where is this going you might ask? Well, it goes to a year later. A few weeks ago I start getting unknown calls to my home and cell phone. The number isn’t identified and no message is left. And just so you know, no, I don’t normally answer calls from unknown numbers. I rely on the message the unknown leave to let me know if I should talk to the person. This goes on every day, at least two or three times a day, for a couple of weeks. Obviously whoever is calling isn’t getting the hint. Finally, in frustration I answer it. Guess who?! Yup, the national office of the eyeglass store with a friendly reminder that I have a checkup due on my eyes. No I don’t, I replied.

And whats more I told the person, I wanted to be put on their do-not-call list, and I wouldn’t be doing business with them again. That is my response to being harassed by a marketer. They abused the permission I gave them to do business with me. Now, if they had left a message on that first phone call I would still be thinking kindly about them. I might even have gone in for a check up. But somewhere in their “marketing” materials it said that the business was only to be conducted person to person and no message left. I can tell you from personal experience and from then looking this company up on the web, they are wasting a lot of money on telemarketing, are creating a lot of bad word-of-mouth, and they are driving away their best prospects - the return customer.

The moral is, once you have permission to do business with someone don’t abuse that privilege.

Don’t, as Buy.com does, send me an email every single day. Sorry, I don’t buy electronics every single day and your email gets annoying so you get marked as spam. Do, as some other shops do, ask me what I would like to be notified about and how often. Your emails will get read, not go into spam, and you will be held in higher regard.

Don’t send me a message with no message! That means a phone call without leaving a message or an email that says “click here because we have something important to tell you.” Guess what? I am not going to click there because what you just told me is that you have some big marketing spiel you are about to unleash on me. If it had confidence in what you had to say, you would have told me up front knowing that I would want to click or call back.

And don’t ever give my information to someone else without my express permission. Because if I find out that you did that, I will never do business with you again. Never, ever abuse that trust that I have in you as a parter in business. If you do, you will cease to be a partner and become just another one of the many advertisers out there who I tune out.