Mary Schmidt Marketing Troubleshooter

I recently got an email from possibly the dumbest pfisher on the planet. It was one of the standards – claiming to be from a bank – someone had been trying to access my account, please verify my account information, etc. However, the reply email address was boa@gmail.com and the pfisher didn’t even try to hide that the site address had nothing to do with Bank of America.

So, I sent it along to abuse@boa and bet my friend Bruce that nobody “live” would read it, much less reply. I was still on the phone with him when the automated response from “noreply” came back.

Thank you for contacting Bank of America to report a potentially fraudulent email, commonly referred to as a “phishing” email. We take your security very seriously and will investigate this matter immediately. If our investigation determines that the email is fraudulent, we will take steps to have the site shut down.

Please note that you will not receive any further response from this mailbox.

For general account inquiries, or other fraud-related events that do not include fraudulent emails, please call the customer service number located on your account statement or refer to the Reporting Fraud section of www.bankofamerica.com/privacy.

Now, I realize BofA probably receives hundreds, even thousands, of these reports and it’s just not practical for a human being to read and respond to every one of the emails. However, it also would be very easy to have something better than “noreply.” Even the pfisher did better, with “Bank of America.” And, what would be so hard about including the customer service number in the email? (Could it be they really don’t want you to call them? Nahhhh…) Lastly, I don’t have a BofA account, so why not do a bit of marketing to me? If I were a customer, wouldn’t it be a great opportunity to make me feel good about BofA… and maybe do more with the bank? It would be very simple to write conversational email text to cover both scenarios. Tell me about your great online banking security, a special offer, and so on. And, encourage me to reply. Otherwise, me no care. Me no call. Me no buy.

Note: I did have a BofA account for several years. Switched to Compass due to BofA’s constantly increasing fees, for pretty much everything. I wouldn’t have been surprised to get charged for – say – “glue on your statement envelope, $5.00.”

Related Posts:
My Pal, “DoNotReply”
No, We never, ever want to talk to you, our customers.

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Tags: email, emarketing
marketing, marketing troubleshooting, Bank of America