advertising emails - friendly or spam?

[Darren]

Hello folks, I didn't know where to put this post, so Paolo, please feel free to move it to a better category.

What are your feelings on emails (or telephone calls) from holiday rental companies about advertising your property with them? I promote my dad's apartment in Spain, and find that sites that don't hide my email address are the ones where advertising marketing emails arrive from.

It annoys me when I receive these emails, but then I can see the other side of the coin, where to build a portfolio of properties the size of holiday rentals ltd and vrbo.com some sort of marketing has to take place directed to owners.

Your thoughts appreciated.

Darren

[Sue Dyer]

Hi Darren
My views on this are similar to people knocking on the door trying to sell me stuff - if I want something I'll reseach, go looking and make an informed decision based on what I've found, not take up something that drops in my lap. I guess (probably?) the majority of folk are lazy and would take what is offered without looking to see what else around is comparable or better.???

Re the knocking on door thing - I'd like to see door to door selling/religion/charity actually be made illegal in the UK - I consider that as Spam in its most intrusive form (IMHO) - Sue

[oskar]

Sorry, totally disagree.

Getting out and selling your wares has been going on since man was created I´m sure, and will carry on until the end of time. Of course, they´ll be people who have no time for you, so you just knock on the next door.

You don´t get anything sitting on your botty waiting for people to come to you!

[Darren]

if I want something I'll reseach, go looking and make an informed decision based on what I've found

Soodyer, I think it's great that owners do that, and like Paolo mentioned in one of his newsletters, it's best to go searching on Google and pretend your a holidaymaker looking for your property.

I can see where Oskar is coming from, what makes it difficult is that I can see both points of view, from a rental business perspective and someone who markets his parents apartment.

Re the knocking on door thing - I'd like to see door to door selling/religion/charity actually be made illegal in the UK

I totally agree, but then sending marketing emails, cold calling and door-to-door are all forms of marketing, if you made it illegal, wouldn't you have to make all forms of marketing illegal?

Interesting comments though, thanks!

[vrooje]

If I got one e-mail from a company looking to add me to their site, that'd be all right.

It's when I get added to a list and I get mail on a regular basis from a site that I get upset. I am not more likely to join a site the second or third time I get an e-mail: in fact, I'm probably less likely to join if I feel spammed.

In fact, I did get one today from someone offering a 30-day trial. I decided not to try it because we're already fully booked for the high season, so it wouldn't do me any good this year -- and I prefer to use free trials at the start of the new year, when most people are looking for their next vacation. So I felt that the free trial would be wasted if I used it now. However, it didn't bother me that they sent the e-mail, because there was no indication that the offer would be sent repeatedly.

[Sue Dyer]

re knocking on the door/cold calling. There's a risk factor of impostors trying to enter your home, especially with older people, that and the total intrusion is what my objections are based on. Emails/junk mail are much easier to ignore and spot the scams. I'm at home on my own a lot - if I don't expect a visitor I just don't answer the door.

I understand the marketing concept but I am personally 100% not going to buy anything from a door to door salesman or suddenly decide I have religion

[paolo]

to build a portfolio of properties the size of holiday rentals ltd and vrbo.com some sort of marketing has to take place directed to owners.

I hear this from rental listing owners, and it sounds as if they believe it is their divine right to have a site with thousands of advertisers. Marketing costs money. There are plenty of legitimate ways to market a service, so why not use them?

It is probably not illegal to send an unsolicited commercial email to a rental owner (where the spam laws are the same as in the UK), because you can argue that you are sending it to a business email address.

Personally I would never respond positively to such an email.

Then there are the sites that have harvested your email by sending you a fake enquiry on an existing ad. That is really naughty.

[Alan Knighting]

Paolo,

Thank you very much for removing the latest recruit to the forum. It is a very sad reflection on society that you have to devote your time to such things but thanks again for doing it

For those who did not click on his website, he was purveying pure porn dressed up as homosexuality.

I am in two minds about spammers but I have no doubts whatever about that sort of filth. There is no room in the world, at least in my world, for that sort of thing.

Alan

[paolo]

Alan,

Every day several of these new 'members' sign up. All forums get abused like this, or at least the ones like this where membership is free and instant. It's an automated process, the spammers send out scripts or bots (I don't know the specifics) that find all forums using a particular software and automatically fill in the registration fields. They do it to get the link to their own website.

The trouble is (apart from the unpleasant surprise you will get when you click on a new member's www button), if a search engine spider sees the link before I get a chance to delete it, that may well get Lay My Hat penalised in the rankings, for linking to a 'bad neighbourhood'.

There is a solution which we will be implementing soon. It will mean that new members will need to make one post before they can display a Signature or link to their own site. But it's a necessary inconvenience.

[Darren]

I hear this from rental listing owners, and it sounds as if they believe it is their divine right to have a site with thousands of advertisers. Marketing costs money. There are plenty of legitimate ways to market a service, so why not use them?

Paolo, it's not difficult to get a listing of thousands of advertisers, rental listing owners could quite easily offer free advertising, and marketing doesn't necessary cost money, they are other avenues out there, but these take time.

You have to be getting in a good ratio of visitors to the properties on your listing, and Im sure thats why HR.com and VRBO.com are so successful, so from my experience free advertising isn't a short term advertising answer.

Going back to email marketing though you are right about it not been illegal in the UK, as it is classed as business to business marketing, even so, it's a gray area, and I just wondered what the opinion of owners was.

With regard to spammers in forums, you can set it up so that the member who is signing up has to enter a generated code, which stops people from using tools to auto signup to PHPBB forums. If you want to know how to do this let me know.

Darren