as a marketing strategy, does SPAM work?

[gatotom]

Quote George Carlin " Think of how stupid the ave. person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that".

[stomachmonkey]

Originally Posted by Ayles

Just spamming people doesn't do any good. And the notion that you can send millions of emails for the price of a coffee is simply not true. Email marketing done correctly and legally isn't that cheap. I have literally sent billions of emails in my advertising career and am quite familiar with what it costs.

It was an analogy.

One can open up a hosting account with a dedicated IP at just about any ISP for $20 a month.

Because it has a dedicated IP they will generally include mass email marketing as an allowed service.

You can bang a crap load of SPAM through the system before the complaints to the ISP get you shut down / your IP blacklisted.

That's one of the things that spammers do and the OP was about SPAM.

You can do a service like iContact and send 1.5 M people emails at a cost of around a half a penny per contact.

That may or may not be SPAM, depending on the source of your list.

You can use, as you seem to, a real legitimate mass marketer / media agency who will compile a qualified list of targeted high purchase intent leads who have all opted in.

That's not SPAM.

That will cost you some money but you are paying for legitimate qualified leads and additional services beyond just pushing random mail through a pipe.

That's what legitimate businesses do. Kudos to you, seriously, not being sarcastic.

Even still at the higher price points the it's a cheap medium.

[Ayles]

Thanks, I do operate to the letter of the law and have only ever emailed someone that asks for it. I do take SPAM issues little personally. It can make this job very difficult for the legit players. The amount of hoops you have to jump through is insane and it get's crazier every year.

That being said, email marketing for the company I work for now is effectively dead.

[spuggy]

Originally Posted by vash

is SPAM an acronym for something?

SPAM is a trademark of the "glistening pink gelatinous meat" (google "spam haikus") manufactured by Hormel. They requested the use of that capitalization when referring to their product, to prevent misunderstanding or confusion. Upon first becoming aware of the "big-I" Internet and the widespread use there of a word that resembled a product of theirs, the first instinct the attack lawyers had was to sue everyone back into the stone age for copyright violation. They (Hormel) very graciously changed their stance when it was explained how deeply it was already rooted into common usage.. And this was before AOL got connected ("death of the internet, film at 11!")

"Spam" is the original term, and a reference to UCE (Unsolicited Commercial Email). "UCE" is the politically-correct term - but few who aren't professional geeks know what it means.

The use of the term "spam" to refer to UCE is a reference to a Monty Python sketch where the guy is being read the menu in a cafeteria and the word "spam" is randomly injected ocasionally at first, but increasingly frequently - until the end of the sketch where almost every word is "spam".

Which mimics what spam used to do, before effective spam filtering existed (because there was never previously any need for it), to your inbox or NNTP reader; you can't see anything for the junk.

Almost everyone knew instantly what the term "spam" was a reference to 20 years ago and considered it a perfect fit when they first encountered it; probably why it stuck.

[stomachmonkey]

Originally Posted by nota

does the 1 .5 return inc the shipping and handling profits ?

or is that purely what the whole scam runs on

if they charge 7.95 to ship
what do they really pay for mass shipping a buck and change ?

Let's take the $10k test amount.

Commercial time is inventory that expires. Once it's gone it's gone. So much like anything else the closer you get to a _____ expiring the cheaper it gets, think seats on a plane. You can buy media at the last minute for pennies on the dollar.

You don't care where the spots run. You do set some demographic parameters for your media buyer but the reality is almost everyone has expiring unsold media.

You run your spots, it has a unique phone number for each different network or some other identifying attribute like the value of the offer. That is how the call center knows when and where the spots ran. The next morning over coffee you look at the report from the call center. You ran on 10 networks, 1 got you a 2.0 MER, woot, 5 got you 1.5 or better, nice, 4 underperformed. You take a closer look at the under performers looking at day part, night parts etc... One did well at 3 AM and one did well at 3 PM.

You call your media buyer and tell them take the money from one of the turds and stick it on the 2.0 to increase frequency. Take the other turd and stick the money on the 1.5's. Condense all the spend on the other 2 from all day to the 3 AM and PM time slots.

You do this every day and what happens is the spot "finds it's audience" and you start slamming money at it.

Now the money side. Works a bunch of different ways but generally you take 85% of what you made each day and stick it back into the media.

For every $1 you spent you got back at least $1.50 so you stick $1.25 back into media and if your MER holds firm you made $1.90, you stick 85%, $1.60 back into media which turns into $2,40 back, rinse and repeat. You can go from $10k in media spend to $1,000,000 faster than you can count the money. And you are generating $1,500,000 in revenue.

For that to work the total COGS of your product can not exceed 25% of the sale price and that includes the "But wait, there's more, buy now and we'll send you 2 ____ for only $__.95" That's why the stuff is generally crap.

Ever see the ones that say Pay nothing now, just S/H. That typically means the COGS plus the S/H are less than what you pay for the S/H. Shipping is a profit center.

You called for a $9.95 item but I've got a killer call center answering the phones with an upsell script. By the time my gal gets done with you you just bought $60.00 worth of crap from me.

The other thing that makes it all work is the "4-6 weeks for shipping".

We don't carry inventory.

We build a very small number of units for the people that will pay extra for expedited shipping. The rest of the "regular" orders we don't actually build the product until after it's sold, that's why 4-6 weeks to get it. We took your money and are using it to manufacture the goods.

If after 2 weeks of testing the product is a turd we kill it and refund your money and we are not sitting on inventory. Very low risk.

The stuff that makes the real money is continuity items, vitamins, cosmetics anything that I can ship you every month and bang your card for every month. I'm not spending money to acquire you, I've got you and I've got your CC number. It typically will take someone 3 months to actually remember to call and cancel that $9.95 a month recurring charge and when you try I've got a killer closer at the call center whose job is it to convince you "you haven't used it long enough, give it 2 more months, isn't $10 worth having better ____, it takes a little longer for some people to see results" and it will take that person another 3 months to remember to call back and cancel. I just got another $50.00 out of you.