Darryl King is the founder of Brisvegas Web company 'ireckon' and discusses email spam
I awoke this morning to the usual small spam pile that slipped through the gatekeeper. Generally this heads back to the retraining farm as quick as can be, as did all but 1 of the emails this morning.
Recognising a name (business name) and a poorly constructed subject got me curious, and so cautiously I opened the mail.
Email Marketing 101 – a subject line should be useful and interesting if it is to have any chance of being opened (apart from by curious tech Execs who like playing with fire).
The subject for this email was simply : de-signs
Yes that is all. And the From Name was De-signs Visual Communication. (maybe they need pictures not words to communicate?).
The email was obviously farmed as it was sent to an address that lives only on one of the back pages of our site and / or is a dictionary word which means they are truly spamming.
So I opened the mail and got more of the same – i.e. a poorly constructed marketing piece which basically listed the services this company offered and a link to their website.
Okay I wanted to know more, given I could do with a magnetic panel for our Sales cars (although I would be hesitant buying from de-signs at present on credibility stakes) - I decide to follow the URL to their website.
NB> I did not click on the link in the email. Why? If you have heard of phishing or other spam mails, the main way they trap people is by making a link look like one thing but when you click it the actual HTML link is something else. They factor in that many people never look at the browser URL once the page has loaded and this is how they catch people out.
So I typed the domain name into my browser to see if
a) this was a real business and;
b) to test the credibility of this email.
This is when I really felt for the people sending this email.
First up this morning the site completely redirected to their hosting company’s website. See the awardspace image to the right. (note the tag line in the image ‘Your winning web hosting provider’ and ‘Trusted by over 900,000 customers’. This is probably not the hosting company’s fault).
So basically either the bill hadn’t been paid or the site wasn’t set up correctly, or a more serious technical fault has occurred.
About 2 hours later I checked back. Something had changed. In IE you get an Error 403, permission denied, and in Firefox you get redirected to a reseller page. This tells me a little more. The company providing hosting to de-signs.com.au is obviously not the real host and they are madly trying to resurrect the client’s domain from wherever it got lost. They resell hosting to their client (or this is how it appears) and something has broken on this side (maybe?). Note the tag lines on this one – “reseller web hosting at its best”. Remember, ireckon this has nothing necessarily to do with the hosting, using our experience as a hosting provider to go by.
So several things have happened here.
A poorly constructed email has gone out
- The email does not comply with Australian spam regulations – there is no obvious method to unsubscribe and given the performance of the email no real information on who is sending it. This could be easily forwarded to the ombudsman for listing as a spam offence.
- Many email providers would junk this because of the above reasons, so many may never get through in future, thus limiting options for email marketing.
- If a list was bought, it could possibly be a bad one and get the business email listed as junk.
- For the number that opened the email they were given an error and either realised it was just a bad email / link or felt like they had been scammed and are probably checking their computers now for some sort of bot. This is a huge credibility penalty as now in future these emails will simply get listed as spam and never get through.
- The company listed hopefully now knows a lot more about their hosting.
- No one checked everything was working at the actual company who is marketing the message. Obviously the developers are responsible too, but many businesses keep refusing to check their own work in online media-something they would never do offline. If you are spending the money – check the end product carefully!
- This message should not have been sent before trading on a Monday morning – it would have to be 1 of the worst times to send mail you want to get noticed.
- A whole bunch of people had to get up early this morning to fix a problem that will haunt their Monday and get their week off to a bad start.
This is a short list that highlights some areas of concern for both De-signs and whoever sent the email. It highlights the rapid knee-jerk way many businesses are doing their online marketing, and most problems are highlighted fully when a customer doesn’t take any care in their own product offering and tries to abdicate all responsibility to the supplier. You have to care and want to know what is happening then you can guarantee you get the best result.
I have to assume this email marketing message was intended to generate business. Otherwise it is just a complete scam and it doesn’t feel smart enough for that. I can almost hear the business owner saying shortly “See email marketing never works. We didn’t get 1 response from that email we sent on Monday”.
Here are some things to think about regarding your online business marketing:
- Do you know where your site is hosted?
- Have you looked at your website recently? Is it working?
- When does your domain name expire?
- When does your hosting expire?
- Where did you get your email marketing list?
- Have you created a plan for what you want to achieve?
- Did you get your email marketing advice from a backyard BBQ last weekend?
- What is the perfect time to send your emails to get them opened?
- What landing page are you sending your email recipients to?
- What was the click through rate (CTR) on your last email campaign?
- What was the open rate on your last email campaign? Do you think it is good enough?
- What was your conversion rate (ie. Sales or leads) from your last campaign?
If you don’t understand any of the above or feel like you need to understand them better, or would not even know where to start to get that information, feel free to ask me and I will steer you in the right direction.
NB> Oh and never, never, never click on links in emails that you do not know for sure are real links!
You can also view Darryl's ireckon blog or his staff's web help blog.
