The Problem with Spam: It Works

Here's a recent spam email I received that caught my eye. In addition to being a testament to the success of myriad international anti-spam legislation and do-not-email registries, this one stood out as an illustration of an intriguing, in some ways disconcerting reality; spam, no matter how bad it may be, clearly works.

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(In the spam, the picture above links to a company called U.S. Drugs)

Why? Because no matter how cheaply spammers can acquire their email lists, those lists still cost money. To offset even minimal costs, spammers have to sell at least one product for a campaign to be effective. Spam can be successful with even the most miniscule of click through and conversion rates...as long as they're not zero.

Therein lies the disconcerting aspect of this spam...there is absolutely no reason this email should have generated a single click through, let alone a sale. Forget needing calls to action, effective key messages or appealing to readers' emotions; this email barely even tells me what it's selling, and what it does go onto say lacks any logic whatsoever.

I can't figure out why this email was ever even sent, let alone why it generated a return. The fact that I've seen this particular email before only adds to adds to its mysterious apparent success.

Spammers wouldn't keep sending these emails if they didn't deliver results. Even if it's only a single sale for every 1,000,000,000 emails sent, the very fact that they keep ending up in my in-box means that they're generating revenues from somebody, somewhere.

As a marketer, I'm intrigued. Is direct email ultimately just a numbers game, with at least some results guaranteed regardless of content? As a communications consultant, I'm offended. What does this email say about the importance of key messages, value propositions, brand attributes and other things I spend a good chunk of my day doing? And what about consumers as a whole? Are we that lazy that we (at least some of us) will buy whatever's put in front us, even if we don't don't what it is?

On a more positive note, there's a lesson to be learned from this email in the form of a potential solution to the spam problem, a solution rooted in free markets, not legislation. One only needs to look at the impact of PIPEDA and the plethora of U.S. anti-spam laws have had on reducing the amount of spam you and I receive to see how legislation doesn't work. A free market solution would look something like this:

1) Disband all efforts currently underway to enact anti-spam legislation or do-not-email databases, for they are more likey to end up being gun-registryesque boondoggles with little or no results.

2) Put funds that were earmarked for said legislation into educational programs to make consumers more aware of the threats posed by spam, and simple ways to combat spam problems (namely, don't even read or open them).

3) In doing so, put the onus on the consumer, not governments, to turn off the spam hose.

Put another way, instead of coming up with a list of people not to spam, make those people acutely aware of how and why they shouldn't justify spam by reading emails or following links therein. Legislation, as we have seen, is but a minor inconvenience to spammers. As with many things, the real solution lies in hitting spammers in the pocketbook, turning off the revenue tap that continues to reward them and justify further spam campaigns.