Monday, July 09, 2007

What Can We Learn from the Best Piece of Spam Ever?

Spam that works, I must be joking right? Nope. This weekend I returned home from a out of town wedding and had received the most clever piece of spam I've ever seen. I should clarify that when I mention 'spam' I am not talking your typical unwanted email, this is the snail mail that I don't want. I consider that spam too.

I received this envelope addressed to me but with my old address and my old employer and title so I was immediately suspicious. There was no return address and it was from Santa Ana, CA which only heightened my suspicion. I only know a few people in CA and none that I can see sending me this type of mail especially without a return address. I opened the envelope and all that was inside was a page that looked torn out of a magazine with a yellow post-it note on it with the handwritten text:

"Evan, Try this, it's really good! -J"

Even the title of the article looked convincing at least it looked like something someone would send me; "Outfox Your Competition with Clever, Profit-Driven Strategies." I can't emphasize enough how much it really looked like it was torn out of a magazine and it had me convinced I had a secret admirer who was looking out for my best interest. Seeing as I'm pretty deep into the PPC industry (and run a great ppc blog) so this type of article is not uncommon, although friends usually send them in link form via IM or email. It took me about 10 minutes of inspection until I noticed the little (and faintly) printed "advertisement" on the very top right of the page, like you so often see in magazines these days.

A extremely clever piece of marketing, I went on to read it anyway and it turned out to be a promo piece for fuelpublishing.com, a newsletter type service for professionals. Not really my thing but the campaign got me wondering what can I take from this off-line marketing effort and apply it to my search marketing efforts.

What Can We Learn from Smart-spam?

The time it took to customize this campaign will in all likelihood be met with higher than normal conversion rates, especially for a snail-mail campaign. Applying this theory to your everyday pay-per-click campaigns can also work wonders. Take the time to customize your account and ads to best-fit your demographics and you will see increased clicks, conversions and account performance. You can do simple things such as customizing your ad-text and titles or just adjusting the content of your landing pages to match the style of your target demographic.

All-in-all, personalization is an amazing powerful seller and while I didn't sign up for the $159 Fuel-Publishing newsletter, I gave their marketing efforts a good 15 minutes of my time and won't soon forget the Fuel Publishing brand.

Just imagine what you could do with 15 minutes of your customers' time!

Posted By Matt O'Hern at 03:02 PM
Permanent Link: What Can We Learn from the Best Piece of Spam Ever? | Comments (1)

(1) Comments on What Can We Learn from the Best Piece of Spam Ever?

I got a similar piece of junk mail, but this was from a local car dealer. It used a smaller envelope with a hand written address, no return. Inside it contained a newspaper clipping, with some "fake" articles about buying cars, and one about the car dealer that sent it. My wife and I actually found this type of mailing kind of creepy. Since you mention a similar one I bet there was an article in some marketing journal about doing this recently.

Comments by Pete Freitag : Tuesday, July 10, 2007 at 11:00 AM

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