We all receive spam each day in our inbox. Some of it is sent from legitimate companies taking shortcuts in their list acquisition efforts. They might have found your address at a trade show or from a local conference – or from your website when researching possible customers in their area.
The majority of spam, however, is pumped out to millions and millions of us each day from one sender in true batch and blast fashion to try to make a quick buck. But do these batch and blast spammers make any money from large volume spamming? I mean, most of it is so obviously spam, I couldn’t imagine too many people actually buying something from such a strategy.
They sure do. But you might be surprised at the conversion rates that spammers rely on.
There’s a sucker born every 12,500,000 emails
A recent study conducted by a team of computer scientists at University of California, Berkley and UC, San Diego found that 1 out of every 12,500,000 spam recipients will convert into a sale. That’s a conversion rate of less than 0.00001 percent.
A legitimate email marketer would (or should) resign with a conversion rate so low; but spammers actually get rich from it – to the tune of $7k/day or $3.5 million/year because they pump an equally shocking number of emails each day through their network.
For more information, read Spam gets 1 response per 12,500,000 emails.
The conversion rates of spam suggest that it’s better to actually send email only to those who ask you to. You’ll get much better results with permission marketing.
