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Barry Dennis is president of Netweb, an Internet and offline marketing and public relations agency.
Good post Boggleworld..
To echo Chiyo, good post. Though I thought that it was something like 50 cents a piece for direct mail? I do know that it gets expensive quick to do such things...one of the many reasons oh so many of us are marketing on the net now hu? :)
In fact, we must take such pains from the very beginning of our in-house list building. We must ensure that the visitors are really clear that they are opting in: opt-in by default (at the end of an order placement screen, for instance) is a bad idea today, if it ever was a good idea.
In informal conversations, I've come to realize that many people don't even know why they are getting certain legitimate email, stuff they definitely asked for.
If we really want long term relationships with customers, we must be nearly precious with our list building methods, our email subject lines and our body copy. This is basically a good thing, but the spammers have forced us into a near obsession.
I like to receive a fair bit of unsolicited commercial email. I can't know everything so I am open to learning new things, learning new ways to do things and to buy things I haven't thought about.
I am against emails that contain fraudently offers or contain ***ographic offers.
In my view of things only these are spam. If I am targeted by an offer of a software tool, I am quite happy to get these.
Barry Dennis may be president of Netweb but he has the right to express his opinion. Since he didn't post his opinion here, I can't see how anyone can accuse him of trolling.
If every new piece of software sent you an email when they released, I'd bet you wouldn't like it. How about every new credit card offer? Every new mortgage rate change? Every new search engine submission offer?
It may be that we each have varying experiences with spam. Over time (and with more exposure) my tolerance has gone way down. One morning this past week I received 30 unsolicited emails in 2 hours. The time required to deal with this (even if it's just the decision to delete) ultimately comes out of my bank account and my productivity -- I resent that mightily.
This is not the kind of online society we should be creating. At a certain threshold, it stops being at all entertaining or useful.
March 2002 May 2001 The spammers are so polluting consumers' e-mailboxes, some say, that they're compromising the medium's potential as a viable marketing tool -- not to mention tying up bandwidth and other resources of Internet service providers, which raises costs for every Internet user. My crystal ball says legitimate email marketing is dead.
Growing Pains for E-Mail Marketers [businessweek.com] With superfluous messages stuffing in-boxes, e-mail marketers are struggling more than ever to cut through the noise. Some of their difficulty comes from soaring levels of obnoxious unsolicited mail -- known as spam -- that hawk everything from discount mortgages to sex. But whether the problem is junk or volume, the result is the same: More and more, people like Loofbourrow -- who gets more than 100 e-mail messages each day -- are tuning out even pitches they might want to see, from companies that asked permission to send them mail.
Are You Serving Spam? [businessweek.com] Overall response rates are falling as e-mail volume rises, with some projections saying it will grow to between 30 times and 40 times the current amount by 2005 -- in large part because of the unsolicited commercial messages known as "spam." "We've trained people to delete mail before they've even opened it," laments John Rizzi, CEO of E-Dialog Inc., a direct-marketing company.
I refuse to use SPAM email, but it still affects how we do business. Between spam filters, spamcops, and too many bad guys, its getting tough to continue communicating with prospects and customers, even with their explicit permission. I've had thousands of legitimate opt-in messages blocked at a recipient's server due to some other @#$%@'s spam attempt from my ISP.
I think you are right RC. The times they are a-changing.
When response rates fall so low that opt-in lists do not produce favorably, all that will be left is spam. And the only spammers that stay in the game will be those fools that got into spamming later, and still believe the dream that they will make money that way.
MailWasher sure helps, and has made email once again a useful business tool for us rather than a time consuming chore.
Us at WMW probably will see the problems before others. I used to get around 250 to 300 spams a day at its worst. Now mailwaher marks around 200 to 250 for auto deletion and i save around 15 to 30 minutes a day, PLUS i dont have to be reminded of the massive moral turpitude around us every morning. That used to start my day in a very bad mood.
However, soon casual users will start to feel it. Those who are maybe now only get a few spam emails a day will soon be receiving 20, then maybe 50.
Agree totally with tesdster and RC here.
The worst offenders to my way of thinking are those offshore emailings involving fraud. I believe these should and will be curtailed eventually.
Right now they are completely unregulated. I think the focus should be on them. Congress is hampered by an aggressive movement to categorize all unsolicited commercial email as Spam.
This overly broad definition of spam that some people are avocating runs counter to two centuries of mailing cases in the US.
Both the positions of absolutely no regulation and the absolute elimination of unsolicated commercial email will not fly.
If you want responsible requlation like we have for tradition mail, then that is what you should be advocating. My understanding is that is what the ethical direct emailer want too.
((BTW, Fried Spam with an over easy egg on toasted English Muffin is a breakfast to savor with strong, black coffee.))
Cheers,
Stickymaster
