25/11/2008 by Tony Attwood.

Given that I don’t buy pharmaceuticals from companies that advertise via junk emails, and I don’t know why anyone does, I wonder why the companies bother to send me so many emails.

In fact they bother, because even a response rate of one sale per 12.5 million is enough to make them good money.

Earlier this year researchers from University of California, Berkeley and UC, San Diego did a study of spam by hijacking the Storm network that itself uses hijacked home computers as relays for junk mail. Storm is said to have over 1 million machines under its control.

On the basis that they were only going to find out what it is like to be in the business by being in the business, the researches created several proxy bots to act as conduits of information between Storm and the 75,000 hijacked home PCs that send emails, sending out their own fake spam.

Two campaigns were run. One copied the way Storm works spreads using viruses and the other advertised a fake pharmacy selling what you’d expect it to sell.

The fake pharmacy looked like Storm’s site but always gave an error message when potential buyers clicked a button to submit their credit card details.

469 million junk e-mail messages were sent over all resulting in 28 sales - a response rate of less than 0.00001%. That would have given an income of around $100 a day. With the size of the full Storm operation that would make $7000 a day.

Because this is less than is reported in the more hysterical sections of the press it is possible that further attacks like this which could harm the spam operators.

Reassuring to know that people aren’t quite as silly as we are sometimes led to believe.

Tony Attwood - if you would like to talk about any aspect of direct marketing, give me a call on 01536 399 000

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19/11/2008 by Tony Attwood.

Although I track the number of hits this blog and other blogs I write get each day, I have never bothered to track what happens to the content after I have put it up.

And so it came as a surprise when one day I found an entire blog of mine reprinted on another site, without any acknowledgement to me.

Now it seems this is not uncommon. According to Biz Report (full reference at the end) Attributor Corporation in the US tracked online content from 100 publishers to see what happened to it.

It turns out that the content is used and re-used - so that most readers have more chance of reading it on another site, than reading it on the original.

There are ways around this. Most sites don’t carry copyright notices, and this can help. But more than that, the more idiosyncratic a site, the more likely it is not to be copied. Of course you might want your material copied - but the problem is that the people copying are unlikely to give you any mention or credit, so it tends not to do you any good.

But that does not make blogs pointless - a significant level of work comes into my company as a result of the various blogs we have - and I have read research that shows that blogs are more cost effective that google ad words as a form of on line advertising.

This blog is a reprint from a daily digest of direct mail news - you can subscribe to that free of charge by sending an email to direct-mail-secrets-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

More information on the story:

http://www.bizreport.com/2008/11/thousands_in_revenues_lost_due_to_pirated_content.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=18112008

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05/11/2008 by Tony Attwood.

This year we’re cutting the costs of direct mail that we mail in January providing we can prepare it during December. The key point is that these mailings don’t have to go out during December - they can be held over for mailing until January - all we need is to have the materials to be able to fill the envelopes etc.

Where we receive the materials between 24 November and 12 December, we give a 20% discount on the envelopes and labour. If we supply the address list for either a business or educational mailing there is also a 20% discount there. Postage is obviously at the normal rates.

There’s a limit to how many of these jobs we can accept over this period - we offer the discount to try and spread the load between December (which is normally quite light for us) and January (which is often very busy.)

If you think you will have materials that you want to send out in January and which will be ready for us to process in late November or December, please do ring our sales team on 01536 399 000.

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