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I send out mass e-mails(subscribed lists)and post products for sale on web sites targeting the sale of goods. It's almost humorous the wide range of responses I get. "Things from Die you Spammer" to "Wow thanks that's just what I'm looking for"
I personally find from both a seller and a consumer point of view that e-mail based advertisement is a good thing. It's Green, cheap, and Easy to use as a consumer. Plus as a Advertiser you can get better feedback from the consumer allowing you to make changes to improve parts for Consumers. My favorites E-mail ads that I subscribe to are TigerDirect, American Girl(I have a little girl), and Lumber Liquidators.
Just wandering what your guys take from either marketer or Consumer is.
If you subscribed to get the posts, then it is not spam.
You see the difference ;)
Anything else is unsolicited and therefore SPAM.
As a consumer, SPAM doesn't taste any better because it's green, the advertising costs are borne by the recipient (and everyone else in the distribution/transmission channel) instead of the advertiser, and it would much easier to use if it was never received in the first place.
On the rare occassion that I received SPAM for something that I might actually be interested in buying (and we're talking perhaps 1 out of thousands), I made it a point to buy the item from the person's competitor. In fact, one time I even replied to the person thanking him for the information, informed him that I never buy from SPAMMERS, and let him know that I bought the item from his competitor.
[edited by: LifeinAsia at 3:40 pm (utc) on July 23, 2008]
I then get to delete the whole lot, scores even hundreds, unopened, unread, unmourned.
What a waste of bandwidth, intelligence, effort.
Green? Not on this planet!
BTW you shouldn't be promoting individual mailing programs here.
Fifty-six percent of consumers consider marketing messages from known senders to be spam if the message is "just not interesting to me" and 50% consider "too frequent e-mails from companies I know" to be spam, according to a new study by Q Interactive conducted in conjunction with marketing research firm MarketingSherpa.According to the report, 31% of respondents said that they consider "e-mails that were once useful but aren't relevant anymore,” to be spam.
Interestingly, respondents said that they hit the “report spam” button for various reasons. Forty-one percent report spam if "the e-mail was not of interest to me,” 25% if "I receive too much e-mail from the sender" and 20% if "I receive too much e-mail from all senders.”
The implications of these 'spam buttons' go far beyond can-spam.
Often, you sign up for an 'occasional notice', and it gets so frequent that they've broken the spirit of the agreement, if not the letter.
If a twice a month email becomes 7+ per week, that makes it spam in my book, too.
And Bad Faith :)
They do themselves a disservice, imho.
I have reached the stage where I rarely subscribe to anything. If I do, i'm real cautious about it.
If I get anything that is repeated, and clearly from a mailing house, they get added to the blacklist and I no longer see anything from them in any shape or form. I wonder how many emails get eaten this way. I'd guess it's an awful lot.
If I didn't opt in, and it's coming at me too frequently, it's spam, imho. If I opted in, a genuine company will take heed of the unsubscribe request.
I have reached the stage where I rarely subscribe to anything. If I do, i'm real cautious about it.
Me too. I don't give out my email address very frequently. On Gmail, and I get NO spam. Absolutely none.
Fifty-six percent of consumers consider marketing messages from known senders to be spam if the message is "just not interesting to me"
I think this is interesting. Seems about right. I've even met some people that fell websites the don't interest them are a waste of virtual space.
spam if the message is "just not interesting to me"
Seems about right.
This is the one that had me the most concerned. Even a totally legitimate email marketer has a hard time keeping every email totally relevant and interesting to every recipient. If you miss the target and send an email that is 'not interesting', the customer should see it as time to unsubscribe, not to accuse the sender of spamming.
I think more education on email practices and definitions by ISPs would go a long way. Its tough to work in the email venue when everyone is speaking different languages.
If you miss the target and send an email that is 'not interesting', the customer should see it as time to unsubscribe, not to accuse the sender of spamming.
But, that's not the recipients fault the sender cannot target accurately, it's entirely the fault of the sender. Greater care and attention should be taken to profile the recipient (with their permission). It doesn't take much effort to do that, and if the sender can't, or is too lazy, then they shouldn't be sending it. It's only because it costs them next to nothing that they don't bother, leaving it to the recipient to do the work.
Consider this: Smart e-mail marketing will engage with the audience and generate better result. Spam, however it is seen, will only frustrate and anger when badly targeted.
But here, many email senders don't have the nous to provide an easy unsubscribe method. And, sadly, many users no longer trust ANY unsubscribe method, as so many are simply confirming to spammers that you exist and can be made to click links.
Email is a method of communication not an advertising medium. Individual B2B emails are fine but mass mailings in my opinion do far more harm to the company sending them than good.
I've worked in marketing for many years (real marketing not just sales) and in my opinion the current trend towards highly "targeted" mailings is wrong-headed. Use your website and mass media to advertise your product and if your offer is good enough customers will come to you. Don't hound them throughout their working day and beyond with your messages. To most of us time is precious and unsolicited sales attempts are extremely time consuming.
Do yourself a favour and find a more civilised way to reach your customers.
"Die You Spammer" works for me
IMHO death is too good for the people who produce this stuff.
[edited by: LifeinAsia at 3:30 pm (utc) on July 25, 2008]
I don't believe in capital punishment, and my previous post was probably a little over the top, but I didn't think that anyone would take the words that seriously.
However I feel very strongly that all these methods of trying to individualy "target" potential customers out of the blue are counter productive. My time is too precious to waste telling some deluded person in a call centre exactly why I'm not interested in their mobile phone package, and I resent the time taken every day to check the more cleverly crafted spam emails before deleting them.
I don't believe in capital punishment, and my previous post was probably a little over the top, but I didn't think that anyone would take the words that seriously.
Like wise with my post; I've told me a million times "Don't Exaggerate!"
Marshall
Spam is meat in a can made popular during WWII
I doubt it's meat, but it was made popular in a can during WWII.
I doubt it's meat, but it was made popular in a can during WWII.
I think Hormel Foods [spam.com] would disagree with you.
Marshall
If you miss the target and send an email that is 'not interesting', the customer should see it as time to unsubscribe, not to accuse the sender of spamming.
The problem with clicking on an "Unsubscribe me" link is that you don't know whether you will end up a) being unsubscribed b) ignored or c) being added as a live address to 100 more email lists.
And I'm not sure I agree that those who send commercial emails get to define what spam is - I think when a recipient regards an email as spam, it's fair enough to say it is spam.
Technically, yes, spam is only Unsolicited Bulk Email (UBE). But if an individual subscribes to a company email list on the understanding that they will receive relevant emails and then they receive a totally irrelevant email from that company, then, in the real world, they have wasted time reading that email, they may have been distracted from the task they were doing and the inbox-intrusion is not in any sense welcome.
Even if that isn't spam technically, you can see why the individual might mentally file it in the same category.
The solution, I think, is to use RSS as the medium for commercial announcements and newsletters. This is better for marketeers who can be sure that 100% (or near enough) of their subscribers are live and actively interested prospects and it's better for people everywhere who are rightly sick of marketing messages being thrust in their face from dawn until dusk.
The solution, I think, is to use RSS as the medium for commercial announcements and newsletters
Many less computer-savvy people still don't know how to use RSS. They get scared of learning new things. This plan might be ideal, but will take a while to catch on.
But with RSS, once you've signed up for one, you never look back - given the choice now, knowing that *I* control RSS - no sell on, no problems unsubscribing - it's no contest.
It still needs development, in my view, but it's the future, in some form!
I happen to know that 50% of my RSS subscribers also have day jobs as web developers.
That's because:
1) It has a geeky-technical sounding name which probably sends shivers down the spines of most. Why not call it eSubscription?
"eSubscribe to us!" / "Add us to your eSubscriptions!"
2) No-one who has a really popular, killer, must-have newsletter has ever said: "We know you get too much unwanted spam on a daily basis, so we're ditching email from now on and you can read our newsletter by eSubscribing"
3) Browser makers and others don't promote eSubscription clients as much as they promote browser clients and eMail clients. (Imagine how daunting eMail would seem, if you had no idea about webmail and you didn't have an email client?)
4) Does MS Outlook even have an eSubscribe facility? (I know Thunderbird does). Do either of them ever talk about it much? Or do you already have to know about it?
1.) There's no good browser-based implementation of RSS. Firefox has several extensions that do okay (most notably Sage Too [addons.mozilla.org]), but the built-in use of Live Bookmarks is hideously awkward. IE is no better, and you can't even add extensions to it. Online implementations are hopelessly geeky, hard to use, and disorganized.
2.) RSS isn't proactive. If a business is having a sale for 24 hours, they need to be able to get their customers' attention instead of waiting for people to remember to check the RSS feed. (I know the stock answer to this is that "proactive" marketing is dead and we should empower the consumer and all that, but if you think people don't appreciate proactive notices like this, you haven't worked in customer service much.)
waiting for people to remember to check the RSS feed
People don't have to remember to check their email?
I'm a webmaster and I don't even do RSS... Thought about it but still haven't done... I haven't really seen how it can help me.
I started using RSS specifically to catch a few blogs that had some relevant stuff and some not (eg Matt Assay, Matt Cutts and at least one not written by someone called Matt).
RSS enabled me to be informed when I wanted to be informed, not at the whim of someone I foolishly gave my email address to.
Since then, I've expanded to selected pages of news services, and other blogs. It's really great for blogs that only occasionally hit on your chosen topic - blogs you'd otherwise either miss - or waste time checking with nothing to see.
But the crowning glory is when I unsubscribe, I get no more. Just like that! - and I never get any form of spam; just what *I* choose.
(And I'm an amateur who's used it for just a few months!)
