It’s Sunday (still! See my previous post for more details) here in Southern Germany, and as I sit in my underground command and control bunker, trying to ignore my four year old son (who is having far too much fun with his “Robots” DVD while I pretend to work), I decided to browse through my Spam folder.
While that may seem to be a bit strange, I like to go through my Spam folder for a few reasons. One of them is my profession (a lot of malicious emails end up getting auto-routed to the Spam folder) and part of it is to see which marketers feel as if they can take my email address from a forum post or a purchased list and start sending me email (a word to the wise: don’t try it, my security background has given me the ability to make life a living hell for you if you send me unsolicited email of any kind).
Tonight was no exception, of course. There was the usual bunch of Storm emails in my Spam folder (security tip: never click on a link in an email you weren’t expecting and/or didn’t ask for), a few “send all your money to Africa” emails (409ers, you need a few new templates!), and, of course, a couple of emails from wanna-be marketing clowns who want to tempt me to do a Spam Slap. But rather than do that right now, shall we simply dissect one?
First, the Subject Line of the message. It read something like this (I’ve altered it to keep from giving any undue publicity to the sender):
>>>> Read This NOW < < DONT DELETE >> From Spammy Loser < <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
OK, ignoring the lack of an apostrophe in “don’t”… That headline was ANNOYING and I opened the email simply because it was more obnoxious than the rest in my Spam folder. At least the subject line did what it was supposed to do — get me to open the email. Not many do that nowadays.
Of course, once I opened it, what did Spammy Loser waste his Annoying yet Effective headline on? Promoting a couple of safe lists, traffic exchanges, and a domain registration service with an MLM component that effectively raises your average domain name fee from about $10 a year to $10 a month.
Yuck!
If you’re going to go to the effort to write an effective email headline (one that gets the reader to actually open the email), then at least take the time to include a compelling offer in the body of the message.
Did I mention that Spammy Loser also recommended that I go for the paid upgrades? Of course he did… geesh!
Thanks for listening,
Tom
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