by Wela on 23 November 2010 22:26
The first thing that comes to your mind is … oh! damn! those spammers. This morning I just deleted about 400 emails from couple of my inboxes from various email marketing companies. Among them Sri Lankan Advertising, SriMails.com, eVision Advertising, CP Promotions, 4th Dimnsion tops the list by sending the most number of emails .. or more SPAM!
I was just annoyed and called some of them and also called the companies they are sending emails on behalf of. Comic Classics! Their customers have no clue about what’s the problem or purposely neglecting with excuses. Some even had balls to say we have outsourced it to our media agency and cant take responsibility on whom they are sending the mails to. Now! what kind of an irresponsible answer it that. As per my knowledge they are equally responsible as the party who are sending the emails. Sad part is they put all these effort to create the emails and they have no clue of to whom they are sending to … just sending out … in other words that sounds like they have no damn clue about their own business. For an example … so called Training Sri Lanka Newsletter have no clue of who they want to reach or train.
Out of the above mentioned companies it seems like nobody had a clue of what they are doing, or no knowledge about the correct process, or the worst case purposely ignoring the situation to make a quick buck out of it. One of them mentioned that they know about the issue but cant stop because it’s a good income source. When I questioned about how the mail addresses were collected (because I never subscribed to) the answer was they have an option to enter the mail address on their site, and anybody can go and enter any email address. How would I know they themselves didn’t enter my email? Rest of the answered were just useless.
Anyways … the way I see it … the end is near. Email campaigns done in the right way can be a very effective marketing tool. But when keep spamming people like this without analyzing the customer preferences it just becomes useless. Right now hotmail and live have already recognized some of them as spammers. and for sure many administrators have blocked these from receiving mails to their networks … and within couple of more months their headless customers also will realize that there is no value in sending emails. For an example SriMails market themselves as they have a database with over 200000 addresses … what's the point if 90% of them are blocked by servers, firewalls and many more receivers just delete these mails and only like 20 of these receivers actually reads these emails. I’m sure most of them don’t have a good tool to track how many emails were received, read etc, or don’t provide a report to the customer.
Something that could have been a good ethical marketing channel have already been spoiled by few companies who call themselves innovators, or first to do e-marketing in the country bla bla … too bad! Even though two of the above listed companies agreed to remove my mail addresses that’s not going to solve the problem at large.
Couple of years ago I also have sent email campaigns for several of my foreign customers, but only to mailing lists where receivers have subscribed. Not just bunches of collected emails.
I’m 100% supportive to any startup company who do business in a professional manner. But people who break all the rules and annoy me … I’ll wait for the next mail from any of you 