Targeted Email Advertising Campaigns

Targeted Email Advertising Campaigns - Do They Really Work?
By Michael Mould

As a normal course of online business, we all want to increase our website traffic with buyers looking for our products, but none of us wants to increase our traffic just for the sake of using up our bandwidth. So, many businesses fall victim to the slick advertising of "targeted" email campaigns claiming they have lists of opt-in customers looking for products like ours. Do you really believe these con men? How many people do you know that put their email addresses on lists asking to be sent information about a specific type of product if and when some clown with a list of email addresses happens to come across that specific product? I get at least a half dozen emails every day trying to push Viagra and Cialis on me and I sure didn't ask for information about products of this nature. I also get Hoodia advertisements that I never asked for. Did you know that the company that holds all of the patents for Hoodia as a weight loss product has not completed their testing of the product and doesn't expect to complete it for at least two more years? All the products claiming to have Hoodia in them haven't enough Hoodia in them to aid in the weight loss of a field mouse, but they get away with their claims since they are sold as dietary supplements and not as prescription weight loss aids. Just another scam on the market.

Most consumers are intelligent enough to find the products and services they want when they want them and don't want their email addresses used to push a hundred unsolicited products on them every day. I for one will go out of my way not to buy any product that I get unsolicited email advertisements about. I guess the spam email of this nature is really not much different than the invasive pharmaceutical advertising on TV. I know that a few months ago, my father kept a log for two weeks of every pill pushing advertisement he saw on TV. Then, when he went to see his doctor, he gave his doctor the list. His doctor asked, "What is this," to which my father replied, "It is a list of all the prescription medications that said I should ask my doctor if they were right for me." His doctor got a kick out of it, and so did I, but in two weeks, he wrote down 79 different prescription medications advertised on the TV channels he watched, and he doesn't watch that much TV!