Email Campaigning Has Got to Go
A prominent book seller in the Utah area launched a haphazard email campaign that resulted in lost marketing dollars and a lot of disgruntled customers. They were sucked into the “email is easy advertising” trap. When people begin to regard your institution as a spam source, that’s asking for trouble.
Countless others have experienced the terribleness of spam. Everyone hates it. It’s on everyone’s badside. I don’t care if you make tons of cash from an email campaign, you risked too much; there was a better option out there that you didn’t take.
A friend of mine and I did some research on this one. We strategically split up email addresses, one for each signup. Many sites out there have compulsory registration, meaning you have to supply them with an email address and a password to be able to use the free services. So for each and every site, we had a different email address. (A great place to go to set this up for free is Fastmail.) Thus, when spam started to flow, we could target exactly where it was coming from.
Wanna know one of the worst spammers? The Wall Street Journal. Now, it wasn’t exactly their own ads that came up. But we could clearly see that they had sold the email address or something that produced oodles of spam. By the way, because of this discovery, we were able to leverage a cease fire to the spam on that account and also a free subscription.
So now the Wall Street Journal is paying, at least to us, out the nose. They lost business as a result of email campaigning.
My advice: it’s just not worth it. There are much better options available out there in cyberspace. (Hint: blogs!)
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Doug Norton
Oct 25th, 2006, 2:00 pm
While I hate email spam as much as the next person, companies will continue to do it as long as their return is always greater than their cost.
Until restrictions come along charging some monetary amount for sending email (or at least spam), I imagine that email campaigns will continue to be prevalent.
Either way, that was a very clever study — I would be interested to hear more about the results.