The Mind of Vatke
Thoughts, Musings and Advice by Andre Vatke

I’ve been getting more spam lately.

Not the kind we have all come to expect – the large-scale offshore crap our spam filters catch – but the kind that smells of desperate marketers acting on bad advice.

This kind of spam often comes direct from the marketer email account rather than a service. Often they mail a poorly written letter to past contacts or people they find online in forums or on social networks as if they were long lost buddies. Often they do it making the most amateur mistake of all: adding all their contacts to the TO: field.

In a blog post last week, Glenn Burks noted that with a bit of sarcasm: "In this day and age with all the trojans and viruses out there just to do a blanket broadcast to everyone in your address book, real smart and really professional looking."

Another variation of this is the marketer who joins a new social network only to have the network send invitations to everyone on their list – even if they are not legitimate contacts. In one example I received repeated invitations from a user going by ‘blindguy55’ to join various social networks. After a bit of research I discover that the reason I’m on this guys email list is because he was terminated from a Leaders Club service for sending tens of thousands of unsolicited emails – against our usage terms.

Why in the year 2009, would anyone still be resorting to sending spam?

[More:]

It’s a question that’s been puzzling me for some time now. We know for a fact that it doesn’t work. After all, Leaders Club has for years offered a free email marketing audio that clearly goes into why irresponsible email not only doesn’t make sense – it opens the marketer up to huge liabilities. It also goes into how to use email the right way – and here’s a clue, it’s not a get rich quick mechanism!

If you want to listen to this audio training simply visit: http://www.leadersclub.com/email101/

Then the answer, in a way, fell into my inbox…

Today I get an email newsletter from a former student of mine suggesting that email is the answer to all marketing problems. Email, she says, allows you to "build personal relationships with an UNLIMITED number of [prospects] in the same amount of time it'd take to build just ONE."

Now, I don’t know about you, but in my book a few emails broadcast to a list isn’t much of a relationship!

She goes on to use a number of statistics to suggest that email use is on the rise and extremely effective. This is much in the same way that in previous weeks she suggested FaceBook, MySpace and YouTube were easy lead generation magnets for the masses simply because they had a lot of users.

That’s rubbish…

Let’s get something straight; email is a very important and powerful tool. But it’s not without its problems and if used incorrectly it can singlehandedly cost you your Internet account, your company distributorship and even a hefty fine.

Wonder why that wasn’t mentioned?

Anyone actually involved in email marketing and speaking honestly about it, will tell you that deliverability, inbox competition and making relevant offers have become major issues for marketers from all industries.

The idea that email, any email, to any list, is some sort of magic spell is dangerous to those people who fall for it.

For email to work, it must be part of a larger effort. Something my former student knows all too well from her years in Leaders Club.

So why the misleading marketing?

As a Leaders Club marketer you’ll always be ahead of the crowd with proven and ethical marketing. Imagine the grief and liability you can save yourself and those you work with if they only knew what was available in our free Email Marketing 101 podcast: http://www.leadersclub.com/email101/

Check it out. It’s just the tip of the iceberg!