Sadly my grandmother passed away recently and today was her funeral. So after a long day away from the office and out of email contact, I just ran through a day’s worth of work emails to get them cleared.

If you send a lot of email marketing like I do, it’s always good to approach your email in a different frame of mind now and again. With more than 50+ emails to read in just 30 minutes, I had little time for messages that weren’t totally relevant to me.

Email newsletters that I would normally scour for something useful didn’t get a glance before I hit the delete key. It goes to show why you need to send regular emails to prospects; I might open and read the same email next week.

But I got one email today that really made me chuckle, from a company called MarketingFile.com. I think I bought some data from them a few years ago.

The email told me that I hadn’t logged into my account for 12 months, so as a security measure they had changed my username and password from the familiar login I know, to a bunch of random characters.

Why? What’s the benefit to me, the customer? There isn’t one; in fact they have just made it harder for me to buy from them in the future as my usual account login won’t work.

And since that will probably frustrate me (as I will have forgotten about this change by then), surely that can’t help the company either, as they could lose a sale.

The email suggested I login right now and change my new “random” login to something I’ll remember. Er, no thanks, don’t think I’ll bother.

Is this a case of the IT department ruining the marketing? Security is very important, but really there was no need for them to change my account details without being requested to. Nobody benefits here.