Cease and Delist
And to think I used to find telemarketing the most aggravating marketing tactic in the world.
I’ve never really minded the intrusion of marketing messages. I’ve had a passion for entertainment-related or logoed premiums since I was young. I’ve inflicted bodily damage on myself by waiting until the half-time extravaganzas to make pit-stops during Super Bowls. I’ve even welcomed direct mail on those days when the postman otherwise would have left nothing.
I used to like e-mail, too.
E-mail has a lot of great qualities. It’s got speed. (You can get that must-have piece of artwork now, well before deadline.) It’s got efficiency. (You can, literally, conduct several conversations at once.) It’s got accessibility. (Running behind on call-backs? Write them on the plane, for instant delivery from the hotel room.)
It has its negative aspects as well. Veteran CBS Radio reporter Rich Lamb has been warning for years that e-mail is killing standard English grammar. (He’s probably right.) And the physical distance it provides often changes the tone of messages. (Angry e-mail lions often become meek telephone lambs when the communication goes live.)
But the “clutter” potential is worst of all. Direct-mail marketers can’t afford to resend the piece every other day, but e-mail marketers can. Telemarketers must at least try to begin their efforts with a relevant list, but e-mail marketers don’t. Thus, Junk Mail is alive and well, and it’s clogging up my inbox.
A lot of it is my own fault. For a while last year, I signed up to receive e-mails from every promotional Web site out there, to keep track of what was happening. While the brand-side operations have kept their correspondence to an acceptable level, many from the new Internet marketing breed quickly became a nuisance — and apparently have sold my name to anyone with money to spend.
I had 14 messages when I got to work this morning, three from co-workers and 11 from online marketers — including four from Webstakes.com and three ersatz newsletters I’ve been getting since I signed up for Grab.com’s billion-dollar sweeps last fall. (I actually don’t mind the daily Trivia Mailer: Did you know that the theme song to Monty Python’s Flying Circus is “The Liberty Bell March” by John Philip Sousa?)
I got three more as I wrote this, including another from Webstakes and one from btamail.net.cn (a “host not found”) with a PCH-style subject line: “Congratulations!!! You’ve won!!” What I won was a “Free Membership” in a “secure and legitimate online home business … that will bring steady dependable income every month and in the shortest amount of time.”
The one saving grace has been that I was at least spared from receiving porn-related e-mail. (I wish I could say the same about my home AOL account.) But even that ended this very morning, when [email protected] delivered an offer for “1000’s of Barnyard Pics.”
Biblical Proportions
The messages occasionally will be entertaining. My personal favorite came earlier last month from the Sea of Life, “the leading producers and manufacturers of Dead Sea Mud salts for massage and bath, moisturizing cream, bath foam and shower gels, and micro algae products.” (There’s another interesting fact: I did not know that the Dead Sea had been renamed the Sea of Life. Now that’s spin.)
The e-mail assured me that, “This is not spam! Please consider this message as part of the liberties the Internet gives to the people.” But kudos to the company, because the URL it offered to unsubscribe at the bottom of the e-mail worked. Aromatherapy’s did not. And a direct reply came back undeliverable, too.
But it all ceases to be fun when the bloodsuckers get involved, those seedy, unscrupulous, and ultimately worthless “entrepreneurs” who don’t care how many people they annoy or offend — or how many legitimate offers on which they cast aspersions. Send it out, hook a few gullible souls, get out before the FTC is any the wiser.
This isn’t really a problem for the recipients; it’s pretty easy to start the morning by deleting all unsolicited e-mails. But as these messages pile up, it is becoming a major problem for the senders, who run the risk of having their legitimate marketing messages deleted indiscriminately along with the obvious junk.
So support stricter industry standards, uphold the ones already in place, and ask those online marketers you’re working with about their list-rental policies. You’d hate to be keeping the same company as barnyard-pics.com.
