NONE: Re: email or quality information?
Re: email or quality information?
Cliff Kurtzman (cliff.kurtzman_at_tenagra.com)
Sat, 6 Jul 1996 23:15:57 -0500
Bruno Bloch <bbloch_at_sprynet.com> wrote:
>Do you find advertising clipped under the wisher of your car frontwindow
>offensive? Do you find advertising dropped into your snail mailbox
>offensive?
>
>If your answer is no, then you have just a few more months to go until
>you feel comfortable with the current new media available and you will
>probably make use of direct e-mail advertising.
>
>100 years ago advertising dropped by to your house from the postman would
>most likely have many people upset. Today it is common sense to get it,
>as will direct e-mailing.
I don't think so. I don't think so at all.
If someone sends me a direct snail mail piece, they have to pay for
writing, printing, postage and the mailing list. It probably comes to more
than a doller per item of snail mail. To put an ad on my car requires
printing the ad and hiring someone to distribute it, which is less
expensive but still costly for large distributions.
Doing a direct mass email is nearly free for the sender. You have to put
some time and effort and maybe buy some inexpensive software to grab your
email addresses, but after that initial investment you can spam away at
virtually no cost but a bit of your time.
The cost of a doller per snail mail ad prevents 10,000 businesses from
snail mailing me an ad each day. Only those that feel I am a target worth
spending that dollar on will mail me an ad, and they won't do it very
frequently unless I respond. That keeps my junk snail mail level
manageable.
If it becomes more acceptable to send out unsolicited email ads, there is
no similar mechanism to keep the level manageable. It will go exponential,
just like many other aspects of the net have. If I go in to the office
each day and need to sort through thousands of email ads just to get to my
business correspondence, then I will no longer be able to use the Net to do
my job. This is why I and so many others feel so strongly about this
subject.
If a company sends me or my staff an unsolicited email ad, my company will
refuse to patronize their company. Every purchase request in my company
must be signed by me, and I have a long memory. It does not matter if the
ad was mass emailed or sent "individually." By sending me an unsolicited
ad, they have demonstrated that 1) they don't have a clue about the
Internet culture; or 2) they do understand the Internet culture but decided
to be rude and offensive anyway. In either event, I don't want to do
business with them.
Al Bredenberg has a nice article on the subject of unsolicited email ads
(Caveat Spammor) in the July issue of Internet World:
http://www.internetworld.com/July96/caveat.html
--Cliff Kurtzman
The Tenagra Corporation
http://arganet.tenagra.com/
