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I see spam daily. In fact most of us see too much of it. We mostly ignore it and here are some reasons why. If you are in the business of affiliate marketing or email campaigns, you’ll want to review these reasons.
- English is not your native language. That is probably one of the main reasons your message is given the deep six. When you state things in English and if English isn’t a skill you command naturally, get some help. Even if the marketing message is something the person opted in to receive, more than likely they will ignore it and mark it as spam going forward if there are basic English mistakes. Most of these are grammatical errors that are quite obvious.
- Sending your marketing in Arabic, when the user can’t read Arabic. Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, etc. – doesn’t matter what foreign language it happens to be, but if you are shotgun marketing your message in one of these non-English languages, you better be precise about your target audience. Basic marketing 101 stuff, but usually I will see a few Arabic messages a day.
- Promoting a domain that has “bot” in it. Cashbot, Moneybot, incomebot, etc. All of those are versions of domains I have seen, and are real. Any domain with the word “bot” will usually be a quick way to have your email marketing sent to the hole of spam hell. No one really wants to put any money into a bot, unless they are looking for a losing proposition for their list or their money.
- Shotgun marketing has your short url blocked. Yes, the short url people do block affiliate urls once people abuse them with shotgun marketing tactics. If the person you are sending your marketing message isn’t opted in, don’t send it. That should be rule #1 on your list before you email. Are they opted in, and if they are not opted in, the next item is to remove the email from the list. It shouldn’t be sent. More often than not, people have short urls blocked because they were lazy and just figured the more they sent, the better the results will be. More does not always make a conversion. Shotgun marketing is generally just a really, really bad marketing tool to use.
- Believing that Twitter is the best marketing tool. Yes, while Twitter can be a great tool, if you are not engaging in conversation with the people, you may as well just be a bot and not a live person. People will be more receptive to your marketing via Twitter if you first engage and actually strike up a real conversation with them. Yes, we are all guilty of using Twitter like it is the end all, be all marketing tool. But yes, we all have been guilty of abusing it.
- Facebook is not your only place to be. While there are probably close to what, ~750 million people on Facebook now, that doesn’t mean that you must have your silly marketing message all over the site. In fact, being on Google+ now has given me the same look I had when I first joined Facebook. Looking at my Facebook stream is like how it was looking at MySpace streams. Look what happened to MySpace just recently. It was no surprise, and now that Google+ is around, Facebook is starting to have that MySpace appearance in feeds.
Marketing by email and affiliate marketing can be a good thing for many people. I think though, if you are ignoring some of the above six items, you’ll find out that marketing and affiliate marketing can be a losing proposition for you. Not because the product is good or bad, or even your messaging. It might just be flat out ignored due to the fact you have already violated some of the six simple reasons on why your marketing message is considered spam.
Technically Speaking, this has been some of the basic and obvious things I see daily. This list could be longer, but I think these six items are some of the main issues on why most marketing (and affiliate) campaigns fail as well as why most people will surely fire the marketing email right into the spam folder.
Related articles
- Spam King Wallace Indicted For Facebook Spam (yro.slashdot.org)
- Email Marketing 101 (oraclemarketing.wordpress.com)
- How to use Twitter to market your company (premierlinedirect.co.uk)
- MySpace sues email marketer for ‘spam’ messages (firstrate.co.nz)
- Sued by Facebook, Spam King surrenders to FBI (zdnet.com)
