Take Away the spam and what do you have?
Take Away the spam and what do you have?
Rachael Dalton-Taggart
Jan 5th, 2005. With the ever-increasing onrush of spam in my email inbox proffering prescription, porn and pirated software I now find myself even deleting the ‘CAD spam’ that may be useful in my day-to-day understanding of the market. Many of my friends and contacts have considered going back to the pen-and-paper methods of old just to avoid the email spam. Then they downloaded spam-blockers as a form of compromise. With that in mind, how long will it take ‘fake rolex’ spammers, and the second-cousin-to-the-dead-king of an African country, to realize that we are not reading their emails? (Another thought: if you send out a spam, and there’s no one there to read it, did it send a message?)
For serious, industry marketers, spam email is a dead duck: All you have to do is look at the rise in spam-blockers and anti-spam legislation, to understand that as a route for professional marketing, spam is irrelevant and quite dicey in legal terms should you wish to use it.
Then you start to look at the other options:- online advertising, customer email newsletters, and opt-in lists - and you find even these have issues that need to be considered carefully, including a huge increase in the availability of web banner blocking software that mean people don’t even see your advertising on sites they visit!
So what’s next? If spam is dead, how can we effectively market online without breaking laws, ‘switching off’ readers or breaking the budget? And then remember, trade shows are becoming sparser than ever, creating yet more obstacles for marketers to make new contacts and leads.
So doing my usual, I went out and asked a few contacts – all of whom market their companies effectively in various spaces.
“I would agree that email spam has worn out its welcome and is becoming more of a nuisance than an effective marketing tool,” said Chad Sanderson, director of Marketing, Spatial Corporation. “However, there are still several electronic marketing avenues that show promise such as opt-in lists, marketing to existing clients or creating electronic surveys for interested parties to complete.”
The advent of ‘targeted advertising’, also termed narrowcasting, means that you can find CAD web sites that serve up your ad specifically to the vertical audience you are targeting. This means instead of paying, say $3000 to display your ad on a general CAD web site, you can pay half that to serve up to just their MCAD readers (or AEC readers etc). Less wasted advertising dollars means you have more flexibility in your budget.
Everyone agrees that customer contact, personalized if possible, is necessary. Customer newsletters, which ten years ago were printed via WordPerfect (remember those times?) and mailed out, were the big thing. They took a distinct backstage to electronic methods and in the growth of the internet, newsletters of any kind became an endangered species. However, it seems that nicely designed email newsletters are seeing an upturn and are generating some response. However, we feel that with the legally protected ability to opt out, the advent of spam filters blocking newsletters along with everything else, even these are at risk of being not worth the money and effort in the medium-term for marketers.
However, there is also an upswing into creative, more productive events that help educate customers as well as help companies get into an upsell position. Peter Heath, Director of Product Marketing at Elysium Inc commented. “I think targeted email and ‘lunch-and-learn’ sessions will become yet more critical to our continued activity. Web sites are vital and need to be continually revamped, as that is where people go for details and to judge a company.”
Greg Smith, at Alkemedia Productions, is a big proponent of ‘edutainment’. He believes every event, meeting, communication with a customer or potential customer should both entertain and educate. “Give them something interesting to walk away with and you’ll find they’ll walk back through your door,” is often repeated in his office. ‘Edutainment’ is difficult, and needs to be highly creative. It requires some thinking ‘out of the box’ to make it effective. Edutainment is for the risk-takers so don’t treat it lightly.
And if we’re really lucky one day, the spammers will get the message too.
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