Comments on: Consumers Believe Spam Means Unwanted, Not Unsolicited Email

By: Buy PSP Go

Buy PSP Go — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 10:20:53 +0000

My email marketing has been marked as spam before and involved contacting all the blacklisting companies out there simply because users decided that a double opt in and a simple ‘remove me’ link in every email wasn’t sufficient enough.

By: Dr. Pete

Dr. Pete — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 23:31:11 +0000

I’ve had this exact problem with clients. Their own customers who needed the update they were sending (i.e. it was communicative, not promotional) would report it as spam, just because they didn’t like the headline or didn’t remember the sender. I’m not sure self-report is a good method at this point.

I also had many issues with the various self-proclaimed spam police and blacklist managers out there. As bad as spammers are (and I hate spammers as much as the next guy), there are a lot of anti-spam warriors who are more concerned with their own street cred and blacklisting people they don’t like than with actually fighting spam.

By: Kelly Rusk

Kelly Rusk — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 12:28:29 +0000

Eddie – In my experience, the only ones who use the opt out link to ‘test’ email addresses are obviously spam. (links are IP addresses, full of spelling mistakes, offering something ridiculous)

Especially if the email is HTML based, they wouldn’t do this, sad to say, because as soon as you open the email, the sender knows it’s a real email address. (That being said, if they are using a legitimate email service provider, you likely don’t need to worry.)

Ok, back to what I was really going to say! As much as we’d love to blame consumers for not knowing any better. I think the blame lies on marketers who’ve been shady and/or lazy about their email practices. We’ve had the technology to provide relevant meaningful emails for years, yet few are still adopting a real strategy around it.

Email marketers should be clear about opt ins, setting expectations for subscribers, while building trust and a mutually beneficial relationship with subscribers (through proper targeting and segmentation).

By: Eddie Chan

Eddie Chan — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 23:38:58 +0000

Personally, I’m hesitant to press the “Unsubscribe” link in promotional emails. A lot of legitimate spammers use that link not as an opt-out but as a test to determine whether or not your email account is live; clicking that link tells spammers that you DO check your email which will result in more spam from them.

Certainly, legit retailers wouldn’t trick subscribers like that. But I have a tough time remembering which newsletters I actually signed up for and which ones are spam.

This is why I just use Gmail’s “Report Spam” link, even when I’m not 100% sure if I actually signed up for the newsletter.

In addition to following proper newsletter etiquette, it might be worthwhile for retailers to remind newsletter recipients that they did indeed sign up for the newsletters themselves. How to do this? I’m not sure. Calling them by name (e.g. “Hi Eddie, we have a great sale going on at…”) might not be good enough.

By: NewSunSEO

NewSunSEO — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 18:23:07 +0000

Hello, I get tons of spam emails every day from scams and people I have never heard of. I consider spam to be basically unwanted emails. Spam comes from emailing lists and some of them offer an unsubscribe feature which is easy to be removed. On the other hand, some do not leaving you with unwanted messages.