Collectibles tend to attract a very different sort of person. Most of the time they are simply the sort of off-beat quirky sort of person I love to work with but every now and then, you run into something a little stranger.
Last week, I found this postcard in my PO Box. Maybe things like this are common in your line of work but this made me stand back and say, huh?
The front was one of those pre-paid postcards with our address scrawled crookedly across the page.
Here is the back:
It reads:
Gentlemen: Please send to me an LP catalog listing. Thank you.
Then on the bottom is a sticker with a PO Box address.
I have ranted before about that fact that I am not one man, let alone multiple men and I cannot stand being referred to as “Sirs” or “Gentlemen” but let’s let that slide.
Assuming LP refers to the records we were selling for a client, I have several questions.
- Firstly, the only way you would know that I am selling records is if you saw them in our eBay store because we don’t have them listed anywhere else. If you’ve seen them, then you’ve seen our entire catalog. I don’t keep some extra stash of records hidden hoping to sell them only to someone sends me a random sketchy handwritten postcard. Did you really send me a postal mailing to ask me to email you a link to a bunch of listings you already looked at? That doesn’t make any sense at all. If you were on our store, why didn’t you just email us while you were there?
- Secondly, the only contact info on this card is a PO Box. If there had been an email or a phone number, I would have been happy to email or call this person and at least see what they were after but I’m certainly not going to mail someone a print out of my store when my inventory changes daily and items I print today probably won’t even be on sale by the time postal mail gets there. Why wouldn’t you give me some kind of means to contact you besides inefficient snail mail? Especially since what you want isn’t clear. I’m not going to pay for a stamp to write you a letter to say, “Huh?”
- Thirdly, there is a ton of room on that postcard. How about a little more info? Who are you? Why do you want to know about records? Are you, in fact, talking about records? There are millions of bits of info this sender could have given me that might have convinced me that he was worth writing back but all he gave me was one awkward sentence. Since none of this makes sense and I don’t know for sure who is is or what he wants, my motivation to write him back (since there is no other contact info) is non-existent.
How would you handle this?
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thank you for the article and make our marketing ask more meaningful.