Working for a company that offers, among other things, email marketing software, I have above-average knowledge of and strong opinions about what good email marketing is. The number one rule is relevance. Even your crappiest email service provider can provide you with basic tools to send a personalized (read: team-specific) message to your subscriber, and not doing so is a message to your reader that you don’t give a shit about them beyond the cash you can suck our of their wallet.

Case in point, I received this email from MLB yesterday:

I’ll refrain from my soapbox speech about how MLB’s monopoly has made it a deformed, twisted freak of a business that would never survive in a free market, and instead get to the point about this email. I’m enraged at MLB for picking favorites in this contest where they should be impartial. I’m enraged that none of the guys getting this free promotion is from my team. I’m enraged to have this one-size-fits-all piece of spam crapped out into my inbox.

And I’m also terrified that if I don’t use this POS tool, I won’t be able to counteract the fact that other people will. MLB is counting on the fact that weak-minded are easily encouraged to support Albert-frigging-Pujols.

But my righteous indignation need not go unsatisfied! We can stick it to MLB and their amateurish marketing techniques by showing them that All-Star means who WE want voted in, not who THEY want voted in.

Remember, you get 25 votes per email address. Yahoo!, Hotmail, and Gmail are your partners in making your voice heard.

I am willing to Vote Votto for you. Send me a message from your email address to give me permission to vote on your behalf, and let me know if you want the Votto-only ballot or the all-Reds package deal. I promise not to send you any unsolicited email–I can’t promise MLB won’t though.