Re: ::scr What porn sites don't want you to know..

["Alaric B. Snell" <alaric@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Friday 11 October 2002 12:22, Simon Batistoni wrote:

> 2) Why? Who actually *buys* this shit? Well, that's actually a more
> complex question, so here goes.
[snip]
> So the spam industry is making most of its money by preying on
> desperate people, and inconveniencing everyone else at the same
> time. I just love human nature.

Yep... I think that about sums it up!

> (This does, of course, not include the spams I get from misguided
> businesses with whom I've dealt once, and who now think that
> reappraising me of their services every week will make me like
> them. They're just fuckwits, rather than parasites).

They are indeed :-) I work for a marketing company that advises these 
fuckwits, although if they don't take the advice we still happily accept 
their money to send the crap!

The biggest problem they have is that somehow they *fail* to imagine what 
it's like to be a customer. It's just beyond them. They go "Hmmm, if we send 
this advert out and get a 3% conversion rate that's 500 sales... cool!". What 
they tend to forget is that if they piss their existing customer base off 
they'll lose ten or twenty percent of it.

Rules of thumb (tho I'm just a techie so miss out on some of the cretinicity):

1) Don't wrangle addresses out of people on false pretences. No hidden 
checkbox saying "If you do not want to be informed of offers, click here" 
then send people boring crud about buying furniture. Instead, say "To be kept 
up to date on new products and special offers, click here" (note the change 
of default) and then only send people new products and special offers, rather 
than just forwarding sections of your catalogue to them at random (they 
already *have* the catalogue, see?).

2) Try to make it interesting. If you're selling to businesses, make a 
monthly newsletter with interesting stuff in it and subtle advertising. 
People will *want* to receive that, and put up with the ads - look at free 
newspapers!

...then there's loads of technical points about making it easy to unsubscribe 
(if they don't want to see it, making it hard to unsubscribe won't force them 
to keep reading it; these are people, not vegetables. In some cases at 
least.), not putting stuff in that takes an age to download, putting sensible 
SMTP headers so mailservers can deprioritise delivery of this stuff over real 
email (otherwise you devalue the whole system, cretin), etc.

ABS

-- 
A city is like a large, complex, rabbit
 - ARP