replying to email marketing

[sharpendtraining]

Anyone reply to email marketing ?(genuine businesses offering goods & services - not spammers directing you to p0rn)

Not replying in a nasty way but putting your offer to them

[Jack Hackett]

Originally Posted by sharpendtraining

Not replying in a nasty way but putting your offer to them

This sentence doesn't make sense. How can you put your offer to the company who are emailing you with their offer?

[sharpendtraining]

Originally Posted by Jack Hackett

This sentence doesn't make sense. How can you put your offer to the company who are emailing you with their offer?

Because you could reply with

"and take me off your list, rant, rant rant"

or you could reply with

"thats really interesting, have you seen my offer.....clicky"

you would have to automate it somehow though

[Jack Hackett]

Originally Posted by sharpendtraining

Because you could reply with

"and take me off your list, rant, rant rant"

Not really, that shouldn't happen. With email marketing, the trick is to get recipients to 'opt in' and agree to email newsletters. That way they won't be treated as spam because they're not unsolicited communications and generally, readers will tend to respond quite well to them.

Incidentally, I notice on your website that you offer plain English letter writing courses. I would respectfully suggest that you have your website copy edited and proofread. There are quite a few punctuation errors, the odd spelling mistake and poor syntax - it doesn't make it look very professional.

[fisicx]

Many email lists use an automated 'no-reply' service with the website url and reply address in the body of the message (like the notifications used by teneric) so setting up an auto responder isn't going to help.

[TWD-Tony]

There are several technical problems here, firstly (just a small point) if an email is sent to a business email address then technically it cannot be SPAM... True SPAM only applies to private email addresses.

Now - the technical problems... Firtly as Fisicx has pointed out, most of these "marketing" emails come from un-monitored email accounts - your reply will simply go nowhere.
Next we have a very common problem - quite a few spammers (for want of a better word) use automated software that send out emails to random email addresses hoping to catch you in the mix, if you have ever seen the emails that are sent to "catch all" email addresses you will know what I mean
The problem with these is they contain either a hidden payload (normally an image) that detects when you open the email or a system at the senders end that waits for replies and then log's them... The upshot of either of these 2 system's is that your email address has been verified and you are then placed on email list's that get used and used and used... MORE SPAM!!!!!!

[sharpendtraining]

Maybe I should have given an example to illustrate my point (thank you for the free advice "Jack Hackett" btw).

I am aware of the techniques used by spammers to guess email addresses and to confirm email , what I am talking about is unsolicited bulk email.

Example; I recently got an email from a local college advertising some of their services. We have had no dealing with this college but do know that they have just teamed up with the local chamber. We were last members of the chamber over 3 years ago and that is very likely where they got their email addresses from.

There was no technology involved (auto responders, opt out footer etc) - they had obviously just poured a .csv file into Outlook and mass mailed.

The ironic thing is, I would have guessed that they would be the first to complain if the boot was on the other foot...

(And I always thought that UBE broke the terms of most ISP's - I have no "existing business relationship")

[Jack Hackett]

Originally Posted by TWD-Tony

True SPAM only applies to private email addresses.

I didn't know that. I've learnt something new today then, cheers Tony

[TWD-Tony]

(And I always thought that UBE broke the terms of most ISP's - I have no "existing business relationship")

AFAIK that only applies to personal email accounts, I think that this was a LAW passed in the USA and seems to have been adopted by most countries / ISP's

It goes something like this - "that one may only communicate to personal email accounts if they have had a prior business relationship or the person has opted-in to getting the email.
Commercial email accounts are not covered under this law."

As for replying to your particular UCE - in this instance I don't think that your example is true UCE, yes it's a bulk email but it is more "personal" than the normal junk? so I say - yes you could try it. What have you got to loose?

[sharpendtraining]

Originally Posted by TWD-Tony

. What have you got to loose?

Thank you Tony, that was my thinking in the first place?