You paid money for that?

I just got a call from someone claiming that I “filled out an online form” asking for more information about “an online education.” When pressed, the nice woman kept changing her story about who she was calling for or how she got my phone number. Eventually she admitted that they have a collection of 50 or more websites and it’s very possible that I didn’t give them my information directly.
She did want to reassure me that I had “no obligation to respond.”
How very thoughtful of her to reassure me that some random person giving her my corporate phone number does not obligate me to anything.
I don’t believe for a second that anyone who knows me signed me up to receive information. But I do appear to have gotten on some new mailing list recently. I’m getting a lot of ‘internship’ and ‘summer work’ offers in snail mail. These advertisements that are clearly targeting a different demographic than the one I belong to.
At least 4 companies (so far) seem to have paid good money for totally fake information about me. Of course, when they’re calling or sending me mail there’s no way I can stop it or fix it. I can’t even tell them their vendor is giving them bad information. I guess I just have to take comfort in the fact that they are wasting their money. I only wish they weren’t wasting my time as well.
This is just one example of why purchasing information, or trusting information filled into websites, is a bad idea. The company selling my information makes their profit and it doesn’t matter that their information is bad. If it really was someone filling in my information, that person is wasting the company’s time.
I’ve worked with marketers long enough to know that they just consider the bad data a cost of doing business. Data integrity just isn’t relevant to making a profit. Send enough email, send enough postcards, ring enough phones and profit appears. Even if their targets aren’t what they were sold.

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Massive new phishing run

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Spam filters and mailbox usage

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Looking at my mailboxes currently I have 11216 unread messages in my mail.app junk folder, 10600 unread messages in my work spam assassin folder and 29401 messages in my personal spam assassin folder (mail getting more than +7 on our version of spam assassin gets filtered into these folders). I went through and marked all of my messages read back in mid-January. That’s a little over 50,000 messages in a little over 5 months or slightly more than 2700 spams a week.
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Get an email address, by any means possible

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The addresses given by people who wouldn’t opt-in willingly aren’t going to be worth anything. These are not people who want your mail, they’re only giving you an address because they’re being forced to do so.
I know it is so tempting for marketers to use any methods to get an email address from customers. I recently was dealing with a very poorly delivering list that looked purchased. There were clear typos, invalid domains, non-existent domains, the whole nine yards. Over 20% of the mail was bouncing and what did get delivered wasn’t going to the inbox. I was working through the problem with the ESP before they went to talk to the customer. To my eye, the list looked purchased. Most times lists just don’t look that bad when they are actually opt-in lists. The ESP insisted that the addresses were being collected at their brick and mortar stores at point of sale. I asked if the company was incentivizing address collection, but the ESP didn’t know.
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Email is a great way to stay in touch with customers. It is an extremely cost effective and profitable way to market. The caveat is that customers have to want that mail. Coercing a customer to give you an address doesn’t make your marketing better. It just makes your delivery harder. That lowers your overall revenue and decreases profits.
Quantity is not the be all and end all of marketing. This company? They have a great email marketing program, but their address collection is so bad hardly anyone gets to see the mail in the inbox, even the people who would be happy to receive the mail.
For email delivery quality trumps quantity every time.

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