Adforum Spam Shoots their own Foot
Adforum has been sending me their “Top 5 Ads This Week” E-mail for roughly two years. I cannot remember how this started - likely because of some visit to their site, but I can’t remember the circumstances.
The result was that, for the last two years and perhaps forevermore, I receive their fluff-filled newsletter. I do not bother reading it anymore. I simply delete it and move on.
Keep in mind, I actually have tried to unsubscribe from this e-mail in the past - several times, in fact. But it still comes here. So I set up an e-mail filter to keep it from getting to me.
The danger to Adforum for not taking care with their e-mail list is, for starters, that mail servers will start recognizing not just these messages as spam, but any message coming out of them. This can be disasterous to a company, particularly one that relies on its mailers.
The more subtle problem they create for themselves is to make everyone on their list feel like anything from AdForum is unimportant. Speaking as one of their unwilling victims, I can tell you honestly that I do not read anything they send me, and as such would be a “bad lead” for them. If you have a contact list full of people who can’t get off of your list, they won’t be receptive to what you have to tell them either.
It is actually a good idea to ping the people on your mailing list every few months if you haven’t heard from them, and make sure they want to continue receiving your e-mail. People seem to think the larger your e-mail list is, the better. Well, maybe, if you’re planning on selling it to someone else it is. If you are interested in the quality of the people on that list, though, you do what you can to make sure everyone receiving your messages wants to be receiving them. Continuing to send people an e-mail - whether they want it or not - damages your brand and reputation.
Adforum, you need to prune your list.
Unless you’re just selling my information to the highest bidder.
Which you probably are. *sigh.*
