The Messaging Times

I was involved in some discussions relating to email marketing and spam last year (may require registration to access). It was an enlightening exercise as I discovered that there are so many individual interpretations as to what constitutes spam.

Apparently, many people feel that abiding by the CAN-Spam Act alone will ensure that their message is perceived as spam-free by recipients.

Unfortunately for them, that’s not the case.

Ultimately, your recipient determines what is and what isn’t spam; and that determination usually has nothing to do with the intricacies of the CAN-Spam Act. During my participation in these discussions, I sounded a few things off Mark Brownlow, who has what is perhaps the most comprehensive email marketing site on the Internet. Fortunately for all of us, Mark took the time to clarify a few things about the issue.

Please read his blog post and associated article, Marketing Email or Spam?

I can’t recommend it enough, even for those of us who think that we have a good understanding of the issue already.

Believe it or not, there are people who think that someone really does want to give them $20 million, even though the email that notified them of it was sent to “undisclosed recipients”. All it takes, apparently, is for the sender to personalize the message.

Janella Spears of Sweet Home says she simply became curious when she received an e-mail promising her $20.5 million if she would only help out a long-lost relative identified as J.B. Spears with a little money up front.

Spears told KATU-TV about the scammers’ ability to identify her relative by name was persuasive.

“That’s what got me to believe it,” She said. “So, why wouldn’t you send over $100?”

Spears, who is a nursing administrator and CPR teacher, said she mortgaged the house and took a lien out on the family car, and ran through her husband’s retirement account.

“The retirement he was dreaming of — cruising and going around and seeing America — is pretty much gone for him right now,” she said.

She estimates it will take two years to clear the debt that accumulated in the more than two years she spent sending money to con artists. [continue reading]

Perhaps it would be wise to remind people about email scam spam here.

Beware of emails announcing that you have won or are eligible for some great sum of money. You’re not the only one who got it.

“…A U.S. based Web hosting firm that security experts say was responsible for facilitating more than 75 percent of the junk e-mail blasted out each day globally has been knocked offline following reports from Security Fix on evidence gathered about suspicious activity emanating from the network.

For the past four months, Security Fix has been gathering data from the security industry about McColo Corp., a San Jose, Calif., based Web hosting service whose client list experts say includes some of the most disreputable cyber-criminal gangs in business today…” continue reading

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.

As a evangelist for GroupMail, I talk to many people who express concerns about whether or not they will be considered spammers when they use a bulk email application. To that end, I thought that it is important to clarify the definition of spam and reiterate the part that bulk sending, regardless of the application used, has to play in the equation.

Spamhaus provides a pretty good definition of spam. Here’s an excerpt:

The word “Spam” as applied to Email means Unsolicited Bulk Email (”UBE”). Unsolicited means that the Recipient has not granted verifiable permission for the message to be sent. Bulk means that the message is sent as a part of a larger collection of messages, all having substantively identical content.

A message is Spam only if it is both Unsolicited and Bulk.

- Unsolicited Email is normal email (examples: first contact enquiries, job enquiries, sales enquiries)
- Bulk Email is normal email (examples: subscriber newsletters, customer communications, discussion lists)

On this blog, we discussed how one of the world’s largest supermarket chains, Tesco, used email marketing successfully to bolster sales by 31 percent. They were certainly sending their messages in bulk (20 million emails sent to customers each month during the campaign.), but they were not spamming.

Why?

Because they were sending their messages to recipients who opted-in, or subscribed, to receive messages from them during the campaign.

In short, using a bulk email application has as much to do with spam as any other standard email software (like MS Outlook, Outlook Express) or web application with which you can send more than one email using bcc or multiple addresses in the To: field. Sure, you can use a bulk email application to spam, sending unsolicited messages to recipients who didn’t give you permission to contact them. You could spam using any off-the-shelf software or web-based email programs. The major spammers worldwide probably use very sophisticated delivery engines to process the millions of messages that they send each day.

But bulk email applications are more often used to legitimately send email to customers or subscribers who gave the sender permission to contact them. The Tesco example above provides evidence of how effective email marketing can be.

For more on the permission side of email marketing, read Newsletter Subscriptions: Do You Have Permission?