Roxilla

Finally, something has irritated me into blogging today…

Hi,

I work for xxx, a leading broker of online advertising, dealing with thousands of independent webmasters like yourself, worldwide.

I’ve had a look at your site and think Roxilla.co.za would be a good match for our client, whose target demographic is similar to your own. We’re working on their behalf to acquire advertising from sites such as yours.

We would be interested in purchasing advertising in the form of a text-based advert on your site. We pay you a fixed annual fee for our advertisements. Once the ad has been placed, we make payments via by PayPal or Moneybookers.

If you are interested, please get back to me with your rates etc. I look forward to hearing from you.

Kind regards,
*Mister Man*

I’m sure we all get a bazilion of these emails in our junkboxes each day, and occasionally like tonight, they even slip past into our inboxes. These are annoying for many reasons, but in my line of work it seriously irks me to see things like this done so, so wrong.

Before I became a web copywriter, I was in Public Relations, and it is this that taught me the basics of communication. Without effective communication or know-how, e-marketing is just spam. But done right, you have the power to reach your target audience directly, without alienating them in the process and without bulking up their junkmail folders.

Of course, most of these emails are sent out by the thousand, through an automated system that leaves no room for personalisation, relevance, targeting or much else – but how is anyone meant to bite, when they are fishing in a massive sea, with just a vague allure and no real direction at all?

I am always tempted to reply asking why they think it’s a good fit, and what they know about my site at all. The one time I was duped into doing a link swap with these people, they weren’t able to even remember what my blog was called though – honestly I think they are surprised when they do get a response.

Argh, it just really does annoy me… with a bit of research and thought, they could have huge results and yet they would rather just carry on with their hit and miss approach. So many e-marketing companies are taking this route, and this is what gives the industry a bad name.

For any spammer types who still think this method works, time to splash some reality on your faces and realise that effective online marketing is EVERYTHING to do with communication and NOTHING to do with generalised mailbox flooding.