… then don’t hammer them with “Buy me!” email the moment they log on the morning after Christmas.

Few things make me dislike you more than your insistence that I spend money on your product mere hours after surviving the year’s largest outlay of cash, short of buying a car or a house. Not to mention surviving a four-hour drive. In the rain. On less-than-preferred sleep.

Now, if you’re a debt consolidation service? (Hello, Amex!) A gym offering membership discounts? (Too many desserts!) A maid service? (This house is trashed!) Okay, maybe we’ll talk.

Takeaway for marketers: Respect your customers. Give ’em a break once in a while. They’ll be there when you return … more so than if you hound them into running away forever.

Merry Christmas. (And Happy Hanukkah, too!)

This being Christmas Eve, and this being a litigious society, you may want to consider printing out this document and leaving it next to the milk and cookies. Hey … you can’t be too careful.

(Thanks to the Center For Consumer Freedom for thinking ahead on behalf of us all.)

“A lovely thing about Christmas is that it’s compulsory, like a thunderstorm, and we all go through it together.”
—Garrison Keillor

This is the sort of letter you never want to get from your mortgage company:

“We are writing to let you know that a computer tape containing information about you and your mortgage account with [name of mortgage company] has been lost while being transported by DHL courier service to a credit reporting company.”

The letter goes on to give regrets, offer 90 free days of credit monitoring service, and explain that the tape included names, account information, payment history, and Social Security numbers.

It’s jarring to get a letter like this, but not particularly surprising. What was a little surprising, though, was that everyone — everyone! — I mentioned this to on the day I got the letter had at least one “oh, yeah, we got one like that last month” type of story.

Hazard of living in the Information Age, I suppose. What to do? Well, you can start by getting the free credit report to which you’re legally entitled. You can explore this FTC page about identity theft. You can Google all day long on the issue. Most of all (and probably most effective of all): You can simply hope you don’t get snared in the net.