Measuring the Misses
I've never met a single person that likes getting spam. Not one. Everybody hates it. I have a couple of enterprising friends on Facebook who share the funnier subject lines about penis enlargement from their spam email folder on their statuses, and many people seem to have a good laugh, but aside from this, no one has found any merit in spam whatsoever.
So why do we keep getting overwhelmed with spam emails? I still wonder about this a lot, and bring it up in conversation. Most people I talk to simply dismiss the annoyance, under the assumption that spammers must be attaining enough success with their vexing email blasts in order to make it worth the cost. The cost of sending out mass spam emails is pretty small, so you only need a very small number of people to respond and buy something in order to make it worth your while. Maybe from a strict financial "rate of return" standpoint, this makes perfect sense.
Forget about rate of return for a moment. Forget the financial stuff you learned when you were in business school. Marketing has to be cost effective, yes, but what you're not doing when you measure the ROI of a spam campaign is quantifying the effect of the "misses". You might blast 40,000 people with a spam email, and if only 3 of them convert and buy something from your site, then perhaps you've made a profit from this small handful of hits, but you've potentially pissed off/annoyed/infuriated the other 39,997 people who had to take the time and effort to recognize it was spam, and then delete it.
And on top of that, spamming is a big marketing failure simply because I can't recite the name of a single company that's ever spammed me before. Unfortunately, spamming is not the "anti-branding", because it doesn't generate much negative word-of-mouth among people for the simple reason that people are so accustomed to ignoring it. We don't take notice of no-name sites that spam our email boxes. They can't destroy their brands because they never bothered to build a reputation with customers in the first place.
Perhaps Bayesian filters are so good in email clients these days that spam emails are essentially a non-issue for most of us. I use Gmail, and I can't remember the last time a spam email showed up in my Inbox. (Instead of the Spam folder.)
But I think the success of a marketing campaign can be measured by what happens with the "misses". If you're annoying the majority of people you're marketing to, just to get a one-time sale from a small portion of your audience, then you're not being effective, you're burning bridges.
So why do we keep getting overwhelmed with spam emails? I still wonder about this a lot, and bring it up in conversation. Most people I talk to simply dismiss the annoyance, under the assumption that spammers must be attaining enough success with their vexing email blasts in order to make it worth the cost. The cost of sending out mass spam emails is pretty small, so you only need a very small number of people to respond and buy something in order to make it worth your while. Maybe from a strict financial "rate of return" standpoint, this makes perfect sense.
Forget about rate of return for a moment. Forget the financial stuff you learned when you were in business school. Marketing has to be cost effective, yes, but what you're not doing when you measure the ROI of a spam campaign is quantifying the effect of the "misses". You might blast 40,000 people with a spam email, and if only 3 of them convert and buy something from your site, then perhaps you've made a profit from this small handful of hits, but you've potentially pissed off/annoyed/infuriated the other 39,997 people who had to take the time and effort to recognize it was spam, and then delete it.
And on top of that, spamming is a big marketing failure simply because I can't recite the name of a single company that's ever spammed me before. Unfortunately, spamming is not the "anti-branding", because it doesn't generate much negative word-of-mouth among people for the simple reason that people are so accustomed to ignoring it. We don't take notice of no-name sites that spam our email boxes. They can't destroy their brands because they never bothered to build a reputation with customers in the first place.
Perhaps Bayesian filters are so good in email clients these days that spam emails are essentially a non-issue for most of us. I use Gmail, and I can't remember the last time a spam email showed up in my Inbox. (Instead of the Spam folder.)
But I think the success of a marketing campaign can be measured by what happens with the "misses". If you're annoying the majority of people you're marketing to, just to get a one-time sale from a small portion of your audience, then you're not being effective, you're burning bridges.