There are endless companies offering to send out millions of emails to sell your products. Some are genuine businesses that take care over their mailing lists but many are just spammers who buy mailing lists from anyone and send out any rubbish they are paid to.

There is also a different approach where you don’t pay for the number of emails sent out but for the number of leads generated from the emails.

Generating leads means that someone (or a computer) has clicked on a link or returned an email in order to show further interest in whatever is being promoted.

This sounds like a better option for the business buying the service and in some cases it is.

But there are many unscrupulous people who when offered a payment for each lead generated, manage to create huge numbers of supposed leads, but they may be very poor quality leads. “Poor quality” in this case means people who are tricked into clicking or replying to something nothing to do with the item being promoted so the chance of them buying is very slim.

They are a variety of ways to do this, including:-

• Offering entry to a competition with big prizes
• Fake retail vouchers e.g. 100 pounds Marks and Spencer voucher for answering 3 questions
• Massive supposed discounts
• Clickbait i.e. the link is labelled with something to catch the eye that may be completely irrelevant to the actual link e.g. “Revealed: Meghan Markel’s Secret Past”

The easiest approach for the unscrupulous is to simply invent supposed leads or buy spam mailing lists and claim they have responded.

Protect your business – do not buy leads unless you are absolutely sure it is the best approach and the business you are buying from is ethical and can get the results you want the way you want.

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On the Internet there are endless Marketing templates – for spam emails, ‘landing’ pages on websites, blog posts, articles and everything else to do with Marketing.

This is good in that it spreads knowledge but it’s also bad that a lot of scammers and spammers simply copy these for their own underhand purposes.

A latest spam message arrived at the radio station offering ‘Do you want to receive coffee cups for a whole year”.

There is a very nice picture of a lot of coffee pods and coffee drinks”.

‘We are giving away free coffee…. “

The template is designed to be used by spammers, giving them a supposed valuable giveaway to encourage people to sign up with them.

But the spammer was too dumb to use the template properly.

The From address is meant to be a business email account that sounds vaguely legitimate, but instead shows ‘@syntax error”.

The footer of the message was supposed to show a company address but instead shows “PLACE HERE YOUR COMPANY DETAILS ALONG WITH…”.

It was also supposed to have an Unsubscribe link at the bottom of the message, but that’s missing as well.

Stupidity prevents people from setting up their spam messages correctly but doesn’t stop them from sending out the pointless messages

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If you own a website, you may get people contacting you offering to write articles for your site.

This is often people looking to be paid for the articles and that is OK.

Sometimes it is people wanting to write articles without pay – they want exposure for their work or just to have their name and writing on a known website.

But there are also scammers who offer this service and they want to steal from you.

A recent email starts with “I am David & I am currently working on an online campaign with a client who would be interested to post an article on your website. The article would discuss topics relevant to your readership and include a natural link to my clients website.”

The senders email address is david.outreach0 @gmail.com which is obviously a personal email address rathe than a business email address so that tells you the message is a scam.

Plus, “…topics relevant to your readership” means the sender has no idea who this email is going out to so is very likely to be part of a mass scam mailout to random email addresses bought on a spam email list.

If the message was genuine, then it would be tailored to the receiving company not for random email addresses and the author would anticipate a reply by email.

However, the email contains a link which is a goobledegook one and tells me to put in my details at that address.

No thanks – keep your scam.

If you have any experiences with these scams do let me know, by email.