"Spam" - Advertising Or Not? Personal experience

To begin with, I do not like mail spam. And always wondered - who needs to send out unsolicited letters with annoying advertising? Who so persistently annoys millions of mailbox owners, what do spammers count on - do they have something they will buy something?

But do not say for nothing - do not judge by yourself about other people. If you personally throw out all the letters with advertising, if your colleague does both the wife and mother-in-law, this does not mean that everyone does this. Especially if the letter with advertising is accidentally "in the subject". Well, let's say you are sitting at a computer, and at the same time you think what you would like to buy mountain skis for the house ... Or the chief was puzzled to buy some new drying cabinet for production. And then you get an e-mail proposal "Supersky for skis" or the same "drying cabinets for nothing". Is this proposal without hesitation you throw in the basket? Hardly. Look at least "on the diagonal". It is possible that in this "spam" proposal will be quite a delicate ...

Until recently, I was engaged in advertising only in my city. Here a set of tools for promoting the standard and direct - newspapers, radio, local TV, "outdoor" ... Well, perhaps, booklets, sponsorship, various one-time "nonstandard". Everything is tried, everything is clear. But then I needed to conduct an advertising campaign for the whole of Russia. I do not need every grandmother to know about our equipment in any village of Zyuzyukino, but I would like to see the supplyers of all manufacturing enterprises, laboratories and auto repair shops know about our offer. What are the ways-channels of information? Agree that, unlike local work in one city, the available channels are much smaller. The federal press and especially TV are not suitable because of unreasonable high prices, and to work separately for each region separately - long and ultimately too expensive.

And here there was an idea to send commercial offers to all potential clients by e-mail.

First, several managers were put on the phone. A specialist searched the Internet for profile sites, called by phone, found out the name of the person responsible for the equipment, wrote down an e-mail by phone to send a commercial offer. The result was depressing - in such a manual way it was possible to send a maximum of 50 letters a day. And there are thousands of enterprises in Russia.

And then I had to think about the automation of the process. Although, I repeat, spam was seen as a malicious idea, judiciously decided - we will not send out to personal mailboxes. Although there are a lot of offers on the Internet like "selling the bases of all businessmen in Moscow", we went honestly - took e-mail from open sources - thematic sites. It is logical to assume that if the auto service publishes its address on the Internet as info@firma.ru - it is ready to consider all the offers that are received to this address. In any "personal sphere" we do not fit our advertising offers.

So, technology. First, we collect the base of e-mail addresses. There are a lot of programs for this, I used Beijing Express Email Address Extractor. The program can "set" on any site a directory such as "Catalog of industrial enterprises in Russia", in any thematic sub-section (for example, "chemical laboratories"). The program itself will collect in a text file all the combinations, similar to the e-mail address (obviously containing the "dog"). C large catalog type Equiptorg can "rob" about a hundred thousand current contacts. For the mailing organization used the component of the engine Joomla, which is made part of our sites, a component called Acy Mailing. To the site was not blocked by the host, set the number of emails in the settings - 8 pieces in 30 seconds.

Thus, we were able to send out about 6,000 commercial offers daily. Of course, the efficiency of such mailing is extremely low - the recipients open and read only 2% of letters (although, if the database is high-quality and topical, it reached 10%). To find out this percentage, just go to the statistics of Acy Mailing.

It would seem - the efficiency is small, but the numbers are large. Of the 6,000 thousand letters sent out (the organization of sending requires half an hour of work of a specialist per day), about 120 separate. And then the statistics are classic. Of those who opened - 10% went to the site, of those who came in - 10% made an order. Total we have 1-2 orders from the mailing daily. A bit, but not a little, given the zero cost of advertising.

By the way, in the advertising letter we necessarily made the reference "I do not want to receive any more such offers". Unsubscribers from the mailing have always been 1-2 every day (from, I will repeat 6000).

Conclusion - spam spam strife. If you take addresses from open sources, neatly draw up a commercial offer, make a thematic mailing (that is, for businesses that are even theoretically your customers), then such mass mailing has the right to life. It is not worth waiting for the great economic effect from it, but it is the most useful tool to replenish the client base.

The main thing - at the end of the letter is always given the opportunity to refuse.