The Web is great. You can easily find and publish information. It is great for trading as you can search through millions of articles and hundreds of vendors to find the product that fits best to your needs and is as cheap as possible. But recently I get a lot of spam from companies I like (Amazon, PayPal and Thalia). I like to get some e-mails from those companies. But how can they provide relevent content instead of spam? When is it good advertising and when does advertising become spam?
Intervall of E-mails
As a rule of thumb, I would say more e-mails without user-interaction than once a month is spam. So it is perfectly fine if I buy ten products in one week to get ten sales confirmation e-mails. But is not okay to get more than once a month information about the cheapest products, the latest cupons or the latest electronics that I could buy as a present for christmas. Of course, if the user has actively changed the interval of e-mails to once a week or even every day, it is okay to sent him e-mails every day. But this should be opt-in. So the user has to get active to get those e-mails.
Easy unsubscribe
In every e-mail should be a link to unsubscribe from this type of mail. The user should not have to login first, before he can unsubscribe. So the link has to be randomly generated for every user.
Unambiguous sender address
Thalia uses the address [email protected] for sending
product news. This is great, because I can create a filter that automatically
deletes these e-mails. So although the unsubscribe-link doesn't work, I can get
rid of this kind of spam without missing my order confirmations that get sent
from [email protected] (that should be something like
[email protected])
Although Thalia has one address that is clearly only for product information,
they didn't solve this problem. They also use
[email protected], what makes it much more difficult
for me to filter spam. But it's better than PayPal. They seem to use
[email protected] which could have any content.
More ideas?
Does anybody have more ideas how companies could make online advertising, but avoid to spam people?