I was wandering around town late Saturday evening after meeting a friend, deep amidst the tomfoolery that goes down in Dublin of a Saturday night in the run up to Chrimbo.

The city centre was packed with people dressed up in their finery gearing up for a night of mirth and merriment.

Including one lady who I passed on Suffolk street who was really getting into the festive spirit.

Despite the weather, her outfit didn’t leave a whole lot to the imagination.

Some might argue she fitted the “all fur coat and no knickers” idiom down to a tee.

And despite the relatively early hour of the evening, she was swinging from pillar to post barely managing to keep herself vertical, swigging from a bottle of florescent alcopops, mowing down pedestrians as she went.

Well it is the festive season after all I guess.

I certainly ain’t one to judge…

Been in plenty of bad states myself over the years.

Anyways…

When I got home I opened an email from a company I’d not heard a peep from in, oh, quite some time..

Turns out they were “wishing me a very merry Christmas”.

How gracious of ‘em. Nice of them to show they “care”.

Leaving aside the phony sentiment for one moment, which I’ll return to for another email, it was the presentation that caught my eye.

But not in a good way.

You see, the email was one of those ridiculous HTML formatted emails so beloved of big dumb companies which require you to click your “display images” button in order to see what they are trying to tell you.

But alas, I simply wasn’t in the mood to do such a thing. A sentiment shared by a lot of other people..

Big dumb company all fur coat and no knickers email marketing, in full festive effect..

There’s a lot of things in life that have me scratching my head, like how the Sunday Independent’s Barry Egan hasn’t been bludgeoned to death yet or why businesses still persist with “social media marketing”, but trying to get inside the head of the numbskull who clicked “send” on this monstrosity outstrips them all.

Why someone would unleash that dogs dinner of an email ensuring a less than optimum response rate is nothing short of criminal.

And acts of similar email vandalism happen every day.

Email criminals wander around unpunished, clogging up innocent inboxes everywhere with their dreadful dirge.

So, how do your emails look?

Are they stripped to bone informative emails that attempt to improve your prospects lives, even if it’s just for a fleeting moment?

Or do you deliver a dogs dinner of an email, which serves only to annoy and irritate?

Are you a fur coat and no knickers email marketer?

If so, you’d better put down that alcopops and sober up, put your knickers on and get to work crafting emails your list will love and appreciate.

Stay Hungry,

Keith “Dufflecoat” Commins

P.S.You can view the monstrosity that crept into my inbox last Saturday night here, if you’ve the stomach to handle such schlock..