I really, really cannot stand over-marketing. You know what I mean, a decent seeming company whose products and services you otherwise respect but they just don't know that the hard sell can often lead to no-sell, especially when it comes to social media? Worse, when current events and trends cause them to spam you with tweets, emails, and status updates? It drives me crazy, and I've even stopped doing business with companies that overdo their communications, even NPOs I otherwise support. 

Wednesday those of us in Texas got a very unwelcome introduction into unannounced emergency rolling blackouts due in part to the recent cold snap. We don't get a lot of freezing weather here and apparently the infrastructure for electric heating, coupled with high winds downing trees and power lines meant we had rolling blackouts from very early morning until mid afternoon.  To say the outages were an inconvenience is an understatement. We didn't have rolling black-outs over the very long and hot summer, so it took a lot of people by surprise.

Flash forward to this afternoon. I got an email from a company that seems to have mastered the soft-sell. OnRamp  is a data center services company, specializing in disaster recovery, managed hosting, and colocation. All that means that if something happens at your office or to your servers, your data is safe. The type of services that OnRamp offers is not cheap, but neither are the consequences of not having disaster recovery.

OnRamp used to have happy hours a few times a year that were very popular with the tech and recruiting crowd. I don't know how many companies they pulled in as customers, but I appreciated the soft sell approach. And today, an email from their CEO reminded me why I like their appearance, even if I'm not in a position to hire them.

This low-key email written in a casually professional tone is very clever. Here's the opening paragraph:

"I think we were all put to the test this week in Texas by the storm that’s now being billed as the worst storm in decades. Whether the power was out at your home or office, you got stuck at a blinking light or your flight was delayed, chances are you were one of the thousands affected by the emergency rolling blackouts. One of our employees was visiting a customer when the power went out in their office building forcing their employees to go home. This storm got us thinking: what would you do if the power was out for hours or even days? Can you afford to be one of those companies?"

It then goes on to mention specifically how OnRamp can help, then a reminder that they experience a "surge in calls" after an emergency, and how such events should be wake up calls.

Clearly, this email from OnRamp was a sales pitch leveraging recent events. It doesn't feel opportunist, it feels like good advice. It's not at all a hard sell, because they don't bombard me with emails all the time just because I'm on their mailing list.  The entire email is written concisely enough that it would be perfect to forward on to executive management who need to make decisions about disaster recovery and data protection.

I wish other companies followed a similar marketing strategy.