Magilla Marketing had an article this week about Bob Richards, who paid $14,000 to an email appending company, only to discover that of the 118,000 email addresses he received over 85,000 of them bounced. Mr. Richards was also terminated from his email service provider due to bounces and complaints. He posted a complaint on RipOffReport.com, issued a press release and reported the appending company to the FTC and other law enforcement.
In his press release, Mr. Richards equates his vendor, and other vendors to email marketers, with drug pushers.
Drug users go to the pusher for their drug and the pushers keep the streets plentiful with drugs. Similarly, marketers go to list services for their drug and many of these list services sell tainted goods. And it’s these list services that fuel the spread of spam.
The end of Ken’s article does reinforce the drug comparison. After all the problems Mr. Richards had with emailing, he is not only considering sending mail again, but sending mail to addresses from the same vendor.
In an e-mail to Richards obtained by this newsletter, Cooper offered a $10,000 refund if Richards would rescind his complaints from the FTC and RipOffReport, among other things.
As of deadline, Richards said he would accept the offer if EmailAppenders removes all the hard and soft bounces and non-financial advisors from the list it supplied, and upon subsequently mailing it, Javelin gets a 90% or better delivery rate.
As was said on a delivery mailing list earlier today: “To use the analogy from article, he’s willing to try LSD instead of Heroin — as long as the pusher promises that it’s not tainted.”
For once, I am speechless. Truly.
I concur with Trout – that is something else!
[…] Laura – from Word to the wise – tells the story of an email marketer that is addicted to sending email, to the point that they just can’t stop doing a bad thing. Apparently sticking your hand in the fire and getting burned once is not enough… Read her full post here: Addictive email marketing. […]