Targeted?
I think Newegg missed a critical bit of information when trying to entice a new purchase.
Related Posts
No one harvests email addresses any more
There are a lot of people who assert that “no one” actually scrapes websites for email addresses any longer. My experience indicates this isn’t exactly true.
We have a rotating set of email addresses on our contact page. Every day we push out a new email address. Every day we expire addresses that were pushed out 7 days ago.
I can say, with 100% certainty, that there are people harvesting addresses off websites. The ads are reasonably “targeted.” Most of them are offering increased traffic, or the ability to monetize the website. Some are offering work from home.
I suppose you could call these targeted mails. After all, what website owner doesn’t want more traffic? Who wouldn’t want to make hundreds of dollars a day from the comfort of their own couch? What website owner doesn’t want their site submitted to 2700 different search engines?
Targeted spam is still spam. And having a rotating, expiring contact address has kept the amount of spam coming into our contact address low enough that the contact address is actually useable. 10 spams a month (for a 7 day old email address) is much more manageable than 1000 emails a month (for a 4 year old email address).
Customized for your profile?
With all the discussion about how daily deal emails are the silver bullet to making a profit on the Internet, I signed up for a couple of lists. Not only did I sign up for different lists, I also signed up for the same lists from different addresses.
One of those programs touts that they send me offers tailored to me. Except that the offers I get at Hotmail are different than the ones I get at Gmail are different from the ones I get elsewhere.
So how tailored is this really? In general there is no difference with how I interact with the mail in those various accounts, so that profile is the same. And, well, the person behind the addresses is all the same. If the ads were specially chosen for me, why am I getting different ones at different accounts? Is this particular marketer simply randomly assigning offers and claiming they’re targeted? How many other mailers claim to send ads tailored to my profile, and then just throw the profile out the window and send whatever they want to send today?
This isn’t to say that there aren’t a some marketers that do pay attention to recipient profiles. But I’m starting to wonder if the majority of “targeting” is more lip service than reality.
What do other people think?
Spam isn't a best practice
I’m hearing a lot of claims about best practices recently and I’m wondering what people really mean by the term. All too often people tell me that they comply with “all best practices” followed by a list of things they do that are clearly not best practices.
Some of those folks are clients or sales prospects but some of them are actually industry colleagues that have customers sending spam. In either case, I’ve been thinking a lot about best practices and what we all mean when we talk about best practices. In conversing with various people it’s clear that the term doesn’t mean what the speakers think it means.
For me, best practice means sending mail in a way that create happy and engaged recipients. There are a lot of details wrapped up in there, but all implementation choices stem from the answer to the question “what will make our customers happy.” But a lot of marketers, email and otherwise, don’t focus on what makes their recipients or targets happy.
In fact, for many people I talk to when they say “best practice” what they really mean is “send as much mail as recipients will tolerate.” This isn’t that surprising, the advertising and marketing industries survive by pushing things as far as the target will tolerate (emphasis added).