Mickey has a great story of what happened when he gave a lead gen company his email address. Over 200 emails in 2 weeks from companies that seem unrelated to the signup company.
It’s this behavior by PayDay senders that causes their mail to be filtered and has caused many, many ESPs just to prohibit that kind of mail on their systems. It’s very much the ugly underbelly of email marketing.
From NPR.
I’ve had clients over the years who were email marketing agencies selling leads to lenders. Their delivery is horrible, even when they’re doing all the “right things” for email. I’ve come to the conclusion that PayDay lenders are a lot like lawyers: “95% of them give the rest a bad name.”
PayDay loans are the one area where content trumps everything else, and so much of the content out there is bad, it can ruin delivery for everything. The NPR article speaks to why that is.
Boris Mizhen is once again on the wrong side of legal action. This time it’s not as simple as Microsoft suing him for creating hundreds of thousands of accounts to try and game the spam scoring system. Instead, he seems to have run afoul of the FTC.
This case isn’t obviously about email, but the FTC alleges that companies under the “control or influence” of Boris set up a network of fake news sites to deceive consumers into a free trial for diet supplements. The free trial involved enrollment in a monthly renewal program which cost consumers up to $158.00 a month.
The websites did not make the enrollment process clear and the companies made it extremely difficult to stop the renewal.
The Verge has a long article about Internet Marketing and how much fraud is perpetrated by people who label themselves Internet Marketers.
It was interesting, but I didn’t think it was necessarily relevant to email marketers until I saw this quote from Roberto Anguizola at the FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection.