Do These Spam Emails Look Familiar?
Posted by Dave McCue on September 30th, 2009
If you take pride in your email marketing, you wouldn’t think your messages would contain elements found in some of the most Spam-tastic emails out there, right? Well, you might be surprised. To illustrate, I’ll be using a collection of the SPAM-iest emails I’ve received lately. If these characteristics sound familiar, it’d be a good idea to make some changes to your messages—the less you have in common with these bottom-feeders the better.
What’s the problem: (click to enlarge the sample message
The absence of a “To” address or any type of personalization leads me to believe that I did not actually win $2.5M dollars from Asia Power Ball Online Lottery Promo. This is also commonly found in emails sent by organizations who do all of their email marketing in-house, and often enter an entire mailing list of addresses entered into the “Bcc” field. The risk of accidentally using the “Cc” field instead of “Bcc” field is one possibly embarrassing reason to avoid this practice. Another is that seeing a blank “To” field can make recipients immediately suspicious as to the validity of your message, regardless of how legitimate you may think it is.
Using generic subject lines is another bad practice. You may not have content as enticing as a multi-million dollar prize, but it’s your responsibility to make it as enticing and informative as possible. And take care to avoid too much fine print or legal copy at the bottom of your messages—it can give recipients the impression that things aren’t what they appear, or that some “catch” is involved. If extensive Terms & Conditions apply, list them on a web page and link to it the way you would your Privacy Policy.
