As a business, we get a lot of junk mail targeted at business owners.  You see, there are actually companies out there that troll the new business registration info on the Secretary of State's web site and send those new businesses all sorts of mail offering promise for all sorts of new (and supposedly critical) things. Some examples include: new business cards, low interest credit cards, state of the art postage machines, professional signage services, et cetera ad infinitum.  Its basically the same thing (and just as annoying) as getting spam emails about Viagra in your email inbox, only way, way more expensive for the sender.

This type of mail is created, packaged and designed to deceive business owners into thinking it actually concerns something we care about. Some of it looks like stuff from a bank.  Some of it looks like it from the IRS or Trademark office. Some of it is even so well designed it looks like it is from a new but very important office that we've never even heard about.  Of course, all of it is "IMPORTANT" and is always the "LAST NOTICE!".

I got one such piece of mail today.  Kudos to the designer of it because I actually opened it, just to check to make sure it wasn't actually important.  Well, they tricked me into opening and reading it, but I have a feeling that a blog post about it wasn't what they were hoping I'd do with it .

Click here (or on the thumbnail above) to see the letter itself. 

It seems that its motivation is to scare me (or anyone who happens to be the "owner/manager" that it is addressed to) into thinking that we are going to get fined $17,000 for some reason.  Then it goes on to site some obscure code and governmental policy (in order to lend credence to its threat).  By the time you get done with the first paragraph you'd be pretty freaked out if you hadn't already seen 8,000 similar letters from similar losers. Take a look at the highlighted portions here.

Anyway, the only point I am trying to make here is that I don't think that threatening random businesses (aka their  potential customers) with thousands of dollars in fines is a good way to warm us up to your product or service. I should rate them...