I, by no means, aspire to be a world class spammer. I don't even want to be in the best spammer national division. I just do what I'm told. So, on a three-times-weekly basis I prepare spam that will go to about 100,000 e-mail addresses within minutes. This is today's business world. This is today's most lethal marketing tool. Lethal, but effective? I'd rather doubt that nowadays. Although you can twist and turn marketing ploys any way you want them, just the way you need them, I highly doubt I would be clicking on things in my e-mail at this point in time. Markets are down, viruses are up, and economies are turning to mush so the marketing world seems to have been turned on its head. I deliver the spam, but it doesn't necessarily mean I eat it myself.
I think the whole concept is absurd - bombard the masses with a message and wait for the magic to work. Problem is the magic's worn off. You may be lucky to get a 33% response, even luckier if 1 or 2 percent of that actually translates into a sale. It doesn't even matter if your message is the wonder stuff - it may be pregnant with the best lead-ins in the world, but if nobody reads it it's like a tree making a crashing sound in the forest and no one's there to hear it. It may even be obliterated before the reader even sees it. It will just be suspended in virtual space, shiny, new, unread, yet hanging about in someone's Junk E-mail box, waiting for the death knell of Purge Deleted Messeages On Program Exit. So. Why do I waste my time doing spam? Because, somehow, somewhere out there, there are still people unarmed with I Hate Spam programs and may manage to click on a piece of marketing detritus which will suddenly transform into a click into a landing page which might just magically become a cash register ringing at the online shopping cart. It's a campaign of hope, of desperation when times are tough and e-mail marketing comes with the smallest bill out of the tri-media giant that seems to gobble up more advertising dollars than anything else in the world. It's a sad case for marketing, but I can tell you there are sites out there that tell you that it does work, that spam is valid, that yes, the world is still full of idiots just waiting to click on that well-meaning message which just may be well-loaded with a Sobig virus and unleashing it upon his entire company's servers. Yes, thanks to him, spam is still all that. So. Three times a week, the spam gets delivered. Then. We watch, we wait. Listen very carefully now.
10:05 AM | |
