The truth of the matter is spammers wouldn’t be sending out masses of e-mails if nobody – including you – ever clicked through to buy anything. We’re talking about e-mails that trick you into handing over bank details (or boldly promise a 12 inch man-hood).
Spammers are only sending out spam because it is successful. It is a 30 year old global industry recently valued at $130bn and growing exponentially. Up to 98 percent of ALL e-mail messages are junk, and if one in a million recipients were to respond, that’s a good response.
This was illustrated by American spammer Howard Carmack in 2003. Ten million spam e-mails promoting herbal stimulant generated 36 sales. The 0.00036 percent conversion rate was generating daily revenues of $360, nearly $100,000 per year.
The environmental impact of spam e-mail is also a concern. In a study earlier this year it was said the energy required to send, deliver and filter out spam globally in a year is equal to powering 2.4 million homes. Over three quarters of this energy consumption comes from people deleting spam, searching for legitimate e-email.
These surprising large numbers only help us understand the scale of things; spam may only be a small handful of the e-mails that you receive on a daily basis but think of the longer term effect. The cost to delete one spam e-mail is 4-5 seconds of time. Or, on average, 2.5p. A few seconds or a couple of pence may sound trivial, but how much spam do you get? A client of ours receives 5,000 e-mails daily, 96% of which are spam. That nicely stacks up to nearly 81 days or £44,000 every year!
How much is it costing you to get rid of something you never said you wanted in the first place?
In addition to time and cost, businesses have to consider the impact to their staff. For spammers there is no incentive to clean their mailing list, so the teenager receives the same advert for the little blue pill as the pensioner.
Perhaps it is only time until business owners not taking adequate steps to stop sexually explicit spam face prosecution or employment tribunals? Common law demands employers provide a safe working environment; this obligation extends to policing what reaches the e-mail inboxes of staff, which is on average 20 spam e-mails a day.
How much unnecessary mental and emotional distress is it causing your staff with inappropriate e-mail?
The solution of course, is to out-law spam and unsolicited e-mail - certainly easier said than done. The next best option is to filter your e-mail before it arrives; this of course costs money but how much would it cost to do nothing? There are many tools on the market but we prefer the MailDefense Suite from GFI.
In the earlier example the solution that filters those 5000 messages every day cost only £340, quite a decent return on investment. If your business has a problem with spam, talk to your existing IT provider or call us on 0845 004 3025.