If you are an email marketer or any company wanting to market your products and services through email, read this. Follow every step if you want to annoy users, lose brand equity and sales.

1. Send Permission-less Email Newsletters

All you need to do is obtain email addresses illegally from every website you can find and send your newsletters to them. Let these emails pop up on victim’s mailboxes and send them wondering what they have done to deserve these spams. Put <ADV>  in your subject line and trick them into thinking you’re doing a legal email campaign because users are stupid. They will be happy to read what you have to say and are very likely to buy your product.

2. Don’t Include An Unsubscribe Link

This is a no brainer, if you want users to stay on your mailing list, don’t include an unsubscribe link! Your newsletter’s content is gold, users would love to receive more of them. Why would they click “Report Spam”, bounce or delete your email? Unless they’re not interested in your spam of course! But most users LIKE anonymous newsletters in their busy inboxes so they’re unlikely to mark it as spam.

3. Okay, Include An Unsubscribe Link

But let them surf through 100 pages before they can hit the life saving unsubscribe button. Let them play hide and seek. Let them log in first, even though these users have never signed up before or cannot remember their log in credentials.

Let’s assume they managed to log in to set their newsletters preferences. Disable the “unsubscribe from newsletter” checkboxes so that users cannot uncheck them and unsubscribe! Genius! This is what we learnt from Mocca.com.

4. Don’t Unsubscribe Them Immediately

Fine, after all the thick walls you have put before them, they still manage to unsubscribe. This is the last tactic you can use to continue spamming them dry.

When they hit unsubscribe, tell them that it will take 30 days to take them off the list. The more number of days the better, this is so that you can continue spamming them during these 30 days or more.

See the pattern here? You have time to continue spamming them but have no time to take them off the list. But don’t worry your users aren’t smart enough to notice that this is absurd.

5. Include Everyone’s Email Addresses In The “To: or CC:” Field

Use your desktop email client like Outlook to send newsletters, and put everyone’s email addresses in the “To: or CC:” field so that everyone else who receive the newsletters can see. Perhaps they can save everyone else’s email addresses so that they can spam each other later, the world needs more spam email newsletters, right?

Conclusion

This is what rogue email marketers do all the time. They are usually engaged by companies wanting to sell their products or services and who are clueless about how to reach out to more people.

As a result, these companies resort to buying email databases sold by companies who collect email addresses all over the internet whether or not they have permission to use them legally for any email campaigns.

With these email addresses, they engage email marketers to do email marketing on them even though none of these poor victims subscribed to these newsletters.

As a result, the rate of users marking these unknown newsletters as spam, unsubscribing, and worse still, hating your brand, is sky high because these email campaigns aren’t targeted at all. They did not sign up for these.

These marketers who think “eventually somebody is going to say yes” are oblivious to the consequences of such email campaigns. Overtime, when more people who aren’t interested gets annoyed about these newsletters and your brand, your company’s reputation naturally goes southwards. Instead of buying from you, they get pissed off and you wonder why they don’t buy from you.