Man Is The Media.
5 Penetrating Tips: Learning Online Marketing From Spammers
April 21st, 2009 by Martin
I detest spam email as much as the next guy. Last year alone I manually sent thousands of mainly work related emails and probably read ten times as many as that. So it goes without saying that I spend a fair amount of time hanging out in my Inbox. I consider spam a fact of life, just like advertising. So I decided to learn from it.
Yesterday I received 20 spam emails from which 3 wasn’t caught by Gmail’s spam filter. I’d say that’s a pretty average harvest, meaning that in the course of a year I manually have to mark over a thousand emails as spam. The spam filter obviously isn’t perfect, although it does a pretty good job, but as a Community and Communications Manager I have to scan the spam folder to make sure important messages don’t end up there by mistake (it happens).
That means looking at over 7,000 spam emails a year. That’s a lot to learn from. Here’s some of what I learned:
1. Choose the right words for stronger penetration (pun intended)
Passing through spam filters is similar to SEO optimization: Find the right keywords and phrases. Test them. If they are no good, use alternatives that say the same. The linguistic work that takes place in Nigerian Internet cafes and similarly shady places continues to amaze me. Never would I have imagined how many euphemisms, allegories, and synonyms could describe genitalia, impotence, and love making in general. Here’s a personal favorite, although from a marketing standpoint it’s completely off-topic (selling Viagra):
“Bear confronts Whitesnake singer”
I’ve been told that spammers flood the gates with gibberish to confuse semantic spam filters, and this must be an excellent example of that. Nonetheless, the richness of language and expression is seemingly endless. Use it as a resource and a competitive factor when tailoring the wording of your important messages.
2. Faking it well enough is making it
A while ago I received this email:
The first thing I normally do after reading the subject of an email, is checking the source. Notice that this email is sent from an .edu email and sure enough drexel.edu belongs to Drexel University. Infousa.com is an email marketing service. So, apart from the fact that I didn’t know Herbert/Pierre or terrorfear.com (again a strong .com domain name) it’s a pretty decent setup, and by spam standards bordering on brilliant. So I clicked the link even though I was sure it was a hoax. I’m adventurous like that sometimes.
The link led to probably the best spam landing page I’ve seen. It’s been removed now but it mentioned a bomb explosion in Copenhagen (my location at the time, obviously generated automatically via my IP location) and it had – seemingly – an embedded video from Reuters (a highly trusted source) from the explosion site. I quickly saw that the video was just an image of a video player, and I didn’t follow the link it led to (probably a virus or something equally evil). The page also had a link to a Wikipedia article which further established credibility.
Key lesson? The right kind of mimicry can make it look like the real deal.
3. Get up close and local
The use of IP address detection and personalization was ingenious. It increased the sense that this was a message with relevance for me. It may be just a 5 % incremental improvement but maybe that’s all it takes to reach the tipping point: Get personal and as close to your stakeholder as possible. Use any means available to fake a personal approach. And don’t forget that information about events in a person’s immediate vicinity is infinitely more interesting that something happening elsewhere.
4. Speak with authority
Whenever you open your mouth or compose an email, you are a source. Sometimes you can’t appear as established or trustworthy as you want to. Perhaps you are building a new business, starting a new blog, or maybe you just graduated. Consider every possible detail about how you appear as a source, right down to your email address. Link to more trusted sources to build your own credibility. The classic marketing trick is putting on white scrubs. In online marketing it’s choosing the right domain and email.
5. Talk to the heart, not the brain
Why did I ultimately click on the link, even though I knew it could put my computer at risk? Because I know for a fact that Copenhagen is a confirmed terror target, and I have family and friends here. Fear is a strong irrational factor and it clouds rational thinking. You see this all the time used by the media, insurance agencies, and many others. Playing on people’s dreams and fears talks to their hearts, and most people rely heavily on the ‘stomach’ when choosing to buy into something (even though they may use rational thought to back up irrationally motivated decisions, e.g. “I really, really want that red car… It’s has four airbags”).
Finally, I have to reiterate that I’m not an advocate of spam or spam techniques. I can think of numerous examples where non-spam companies makes aggresive use of the techniques above. In essence the fine line between what is spam and what is not, is related to volume and permission. Online marketing techniques transcend those two factors. I highly recommend observing the CAN SPAM Act whenever you email more than just a few people.
[...] when I search for them. It’s a simple, free, and very effective way to market your business 5 Penetrating Tips: Learning Online Marketing From Spammers – ferrogate.com 04/21/2009 I detest spam email as much as the next guy. Last year alone I manually [...]
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Yes, spammers are clever, and yes – we can learn from them.
I used to work for SoftScan (hosted spam and virus scanning through MX records), and theese guys (the spammers) were more and more creative.
They still have things to learn. I mean – have you ever received an e-mail where they speak “danish”? Kind of funny…!
On porn sites this “IP location” is a very normal thing to use.
I used to work with warez (before the P2P clients), used to write my own spam, used to distribute pirate software.
Now I work with commercials in a highly respected add company
Hi Søren. Sounds like you’ve had your share of spam experience! No, I don’t recall getting Danish spam, but I am getting more and more Spanish and French stuff. Probably the Danish language area is not big enough to tempt manual translation, but I guess it’s only a matter of time before we see auto-translated versions in our inboxes.