Forum Moderators: skibum
According to a survey conducted by security firm Mirapoint and market research company the Radicati Group, nearly a third of e-mail users have clicked on links in spam messages.One in ten users have bought products advertised in junk mail.
Source: BBC News [news.bbc.co.uk]
Interesting stastics but you have to wonder if they maybe only apply to the "takes the time to complete surveys" user group! ;)
Pretty much everyone I know will not click on spam emails or open random attachments and that includes my parents who have the technical literacy of an 8 year old.
Spammers are criminals, plain and simple.
A little harsh IMO - there are a lot of legitimate businesses who legally undertake activities that could be defined as "spam". However the line between legitimate marketing, opportunism and virus proliferation is fairly vague when it comes to your inbox!
Scott
I seriously doubt the accuracy of the report.
Let's say the average person receives 10,000 spam emails in a year. I think it's more than that.
So ten people receive 100,000 spams. One in ten of them actually buy something. So the conversion rate is 1 out of 100,000, or, let me see, 0.001%. Not sure I got the decimal point right.
It's a very low conversion rate. But that's OK, because it still costs very little to send out a million spam emails. Until that cost changes there will always be spam.
I don't know about you but I always count conversion as sales vs number of unique visitors (not impressions or clicks).
If I send an offer to 10 people (all opt-in & targeted prospects on my maiing list) many times and 1 buys, I think that's a 10% conversion and it is pretty good for me.
Can you imagine how untargeted spam is? All sorts of rubbish and stuffs and 1 in 10 buys? Even if they are exposed a million times each to the spam, it is hard to imagine that many buys or even read them.
[edited by: eyeinthesky at 11:13 pm (utc) on Mar. 24, 2005]
I agree with eyeinthesky but to each his own. I guess there are other ways of looking at it.
All the Best,
C.K.
The original point was that 1 in 10 people admitted to having bought something from spam. That doesn't mean that they bought something from 1 out of 10 spam emails they received!
It means that ONCE, they bought something from the many thousands of spam emails they have received. And that's bad enough.
Turn it around. You're a spam emailer. You send out 1 million emails. Do you get 100,000 sales, which would be a 10% conversion rate? No, but maybe you get 10, or maybe 100. And since spam is so cheap, that might make it worth your while.
It's still not a 10% conversion rate. Not even close. You're off by several orders of magnitude. And that matters, if you're trying to decide on a marketing approach....
