Last updated on April 13th, 2015 at 02:04 pm

This blog post aims to explore the reasons that you, as a business, should think carefully about how you are going to target any mail shots that you are sending out.

I live in rural North Wales and have recently managed to upgrade from ADSL to ADSL 2+ in order to improve the broadband speed that I get at home. This has improved the broadband speed from around 1mbps to just under 2mbps.

Imagine my surprise and “delight” when I got a letter from BT telling me that was headed “Supercharge your broadband speed with BT Infinity”. The letter went on to tell me that BT’s fibre optic broadband is four times faster than the UK average and telling me that they invited me to try out the BT speed-checker and offering me a deal to switch to BT Infinity for just £9 a month for the first 3 months.

I visited the BT speed-checker and entered my phone number only for the BT website to tell me that BT Infinity was not available on my phone line and that my expected speed was 2mbps on the ADSL line I already had.

The moral of the story is that you should target your mail shots – if BT had done this they should have known that the address was too far from a local exchange and the BT Infinity was not available in the area. A few simple checks by them would have saved them the cost of sending out the letter and reduced the risk of upsetting a possible customer by offering them a service that wasn’t available. So, if you are sending out letters or emails please think about targeting them or you risk getting them wrong.