Spamming + Experience = Gaining traction leveraging spammers expertise

According to a study made by Security company Marshal, 29% of Internet users have bought something from an email spam. An amazing ratio. Though we can doubt about the relevancy of the study made using the answers of 600 respondents from the Marshal website, the interest about the reasons of such a high purchase ratio is noticeable. What can we take from the spam process experience and expertise?

Inviting people to read email and click on the link to the product page

The purchase process from an email includes many barriers from each of them companies can lose their customers due to a lack of confidence or interest. The lower the barrier is the higher purchase rate you can reach. Spam-centric companies have made their business in lowering the those barriers as well as generating worms and trojan horses to suck friends emails from users.

The first barrier to down to lead to the final purchase is to avoid the lack of confidence in the email sender. To make it happen, the deal is to generate more interest in the content of the email than fear of the sender. Content is king then and using clear and targeted keywords are essential: email title is gold and you can’t afford to put to much marketing words in it. Go straight and answer fast the question the audience is asking: “what’s in it for me?”. Being able to tell your consumers what’s their interest in opening the email would definitely raise your opening rate. But that’s just the start.

Surf on the news and create complicity with your email audience

Your subscribers are just not subscribers. They’re your community and as they’re waiting for you to entertain and interest them you have to connect with them. Connecting meaning here to know how to create complicity and provide them with content that would answer their need. In the spam case, it’s mainly providing them with a content they wouldn’t look for directly (viagra, drugs, …), but in the case of a consumers packaged goods (CPG) company, the objective is to send them a message that would promote them when spreading it.

To get some interesting examples, have a look at how entertainment companies and gaming brands do. To create interest, creating scarcity is one method, another one is to start a series of messages involving consecutively different kind of customers, to connect them together and raise interest for a specific cluster to read the content targeted to another.

Content matters, but people are gold

Emailing is not information only. It’s about people since they’re the one who are paying for the products you’re selling. Shape the click-to-action in order to develop the user experience and not just “now you’ve read our content, click here” style. Emailing is writing a story and whatever the quality of the content in your email, if the action to go and purchase isn’t intelligently connected you can be sure you’ve lost your consumer.

After having down the “first impression” (why do the company send me an email worry) barrier and generated enough interest vs time consuming, and lastly created a connection with the consumer to make him click on your link, think well about the landing page. You have to continue on story telling. Avoid the standard landing page (product page, corporate website, …) and focus on what matters to them. That’s what spam-centric companies do and that’s why they have such an excellent rate (even if it’s 10% purchase, be sure standard companies dream about that ratio).

Inspired by the Dosh Dosh post.

Phoro Credit: Toonie52

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