SPAM vs. Email advertising
August 20th, 2007 Posted in Research
Have you ever stopped to read a spam message? It may look something like this, (actual message from my gmail account).
Subject: Adobe Adobe Professional
Body: Cheap chaep Adobe products!!! Click here best price on all software. (link removed) Adobe Professsional $199.99 USD. Limited time offer!!!!
Like 99% of other computer users, I just delete the messages before I even read them. According to CudaMail.com, it costs companies like Leo Burnett Canada about $50,000 a year. Even if their employees are deleting the emails without opening them. However, it only costs serious spammers about $0.0125/message to flood our inboxes with emails hocking everything from Viagra to Vicodin.
The sad part is that some people still fall for these scams. Just how many? Let’s look at the math.
The serious spammer sends upwards of 100,000,000 emails* at a time using a variety of methods including zombie networks at an approx. cost of .00125/email:
100,000,000 x $0.0125 = $125,000 to send the email that tried to sell me Adobe Professional.
At that rate, they would need <1% to reply in order to break even. Not bad odds.
So what does this have to do with advertising? Well, our legit email marketing campaigns are getting caught up with all of this spam. Many spam filters are collecting our perfectly crafted sales pitches for real products with real benefits much like this one. Marketers are spending thousands on messages that might not ever see the eyes of their consumers!
If you have not started doing so, forward the suspicious messages you receive to http://www.ftc.gov/spam/ as they will use the messages to track down and prosecute the spammers. And hopefully, we can start to win the fight against spam!
* Does that number seem high? AOL blocks up to 10 Billion Spam messages per day!
