Entertainment For Lively Minds
Amazon Spam
Posted by JohnW on 30 November 2011 - 6:21pm.
I used to get an Amazon email around once a week, perhaps less than that. I used to read them all (or most of them). I now get at least one a day. I now don't even download them. Am I the only one that Amazon overload means that they're missing their target completely?
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Me too
Deleted without reading. Counter-productive.
I just delete them
Everyday seems to be the same email: Save on boxsets!
So deleted on arrival now.
Amazon
I imagine it works out very well for them. If traditional spammers can thrive on a one-in-a-million model (if you get one sale out of a million mails, you're in profit), Amazon will be doing just fine. Unlike spam, Amazon's mails are legitimate and targeted at current customers. And I assume many of them will be paid for by the companies behind the goods they're advertising. So they're being paid to send, and will have a much higher hit-rate than spammers. Sounds like a good model to me.
never read them
I am totally resistant to advertising. Hate it. I delete the Amazon emails and any other spam. Watch telly on PVR and skip the ads. Dont listen to commercial radio. The one place they get you is YouTube where whatever to last googled through Chrome comes up as an advert. I have fun with it, Googling spurious things like combine harvesters or flower pot manufacturers just to make it work a bit harder. if I want something I'll do some looking myself, using my criteria.
Deleted here too
I don't agree with Fraser's comment about the hit rate. I think it would have been much higher before when they seemed to be better targeted. I'd open it and would probably be interested. Now it's just the daily spam and anything they could pique my interest with, will remain unseen.
Maybe
But if the hit rate were higher doing it another way, Amazon would be doing that, I think. They'll know exactly how successful every single campaign is because they can tie each link followed to any subsequent purchases, so why would they deliberately choose a less effective approach? In summary: It may not work for you, but I bet it works for them.
I daresay
you're right and they know their own business.
Erm …
… why not sign into your account and turn them off?
Genius
I'll tell you why I hadn't done that till 10 seconds ago - I thought it switched off all emails, like the transactional order related ones. But now there's an option to switch off marketing emails only, which I have done.
Doing the same
I wasn't aware that option existed either but still my point remains that when they were infrequent I read them, now I don't even download them. Now I've stopped them altogether, I won't even know if Amazon revert back to their old method. Seems an odd marketing method to me.
You might say that...
...but just be thankful you're not a Vistaprint customer. *THEN* you'll know all about heavy-handed email shots.
I made the mistake of buying some business cards six months ago and seem to get at least one marketing offer every day from them. Now, I know I can opt out of all of this stuff, but, but...
If they only sent one per month I might actually look to see what offer they've got on the go. Which are usually somethnig like:
"Everything totally free and postage is free too. In fact, we'll GIVE you money. Honest! No catches. It's a wonder we are still in business...."
...or summat.
Vistaprint
Yep. A deluge of e-mail. Incredible. They make it feel like the New Year sales at a pound shop.
Over the interweb like a rash in more ways than one
There is a lot of comment out there about folk buying stuff from Vistaprint and then mysteriously getting money taken monthly from their credit cards in a way which is incredibly hard to stop or to get this money back. The line is that supposedly that the "customers" signed up to some rewards scheme during some other transaction: the "customers" disagree, and call it a scam. I believe this technique is known as Bait And Switch.
I don't know if this is still the case with Vistaprint, or whether it is ancient history. However I've been stung by this sort of thing (not from Vistaprint, m'learned friends...) before so if I get the merest whiff of this from a company then the sirens go up and there is no way I would get anything from there. Of course that wouldn't stop the emails.