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Inside the Mind of a Spammer
Let's play pretend for a second. Pretend that you sell products on the internet, and that these products are not particularly legal, per se. Perhaps you sell generic Viagra, even though Viagra's patent hasn't run out yet. Or perhaps your particular weight-loss formula hasn't exactly been approved by the FDA. Either way, you can't advertise on television, so you resort to mass mailing via the internet.
Direct marketing is a highly-effective and proven way to generate customers. You can get your message out to millions of people instantly, and obviously people respond or else companies wouldn't continue to market this way. However, this is one group of people who are not interested in your product, no matter how potent it is, how much it increases your manhood, or how underage the girls are.
These people are aware of your product, having received countless number of your messages before, but just aren't interested. They run spam-blocking programs like Spamassassin so that they don't get your messages. As a marketing director, do you:
a) maintain a list of folks who actually do respond to your messages, treat these as your customer base, and target them with custom-tailored values in an effort to entice repeat business out of them.
or b) attempt to thwart spam-blocking programs by inserting garbage characters and random words and phrases into your messages so that noncustomers continue to receive advertisements that they aren't interested in. Not only this, but the people who actually might be interested are receiving the same messages which have now been rendered unreadable and totally unprofessional by the garbage characters and random phrases.
Choice b does not seem to make much sense, yet that is the choice most often made. Anti-spam legislation still seems a long way off, but perhaps in the meantime the spammers will catch on to basic business sense.
Comments
trophy empirical untoasted suscitate But doesn't everybody talk like this Chris? trophy empirical untoasted suscitate duckweed
Posted by: jim at February 15, 2004 10:19 PM
I got one the other day with fake HTML tags in with the message. It's a good lesson of why you should always remember to match your opening [pheasant] tags with closing [/hippopotamus] tags.
Posted by: Chris Hill Festival at February 15, 2004 10:27 PM
If the names of heavy metal bands are any indication, a few needless umlauts in the subject line can only increase business.
Posted by: ab9 at February 19, 2004 1:26 AM
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