This afternoon, I received an email off my contact form from the unfortunately named Elias Shams at the unfortunately named Searchles. According to the email footer, “Searchles” rhymes with “circles.” I can’t help thinking, though, that there’s a fundamental problem with you brand when you have to point out to people that it does not rhyme with words like artless, tactless and clueless.

Anyway, the email just smelled spammy; it was not addressed to me personally, and not about anything I’ve ever expressed any interest in. So I double-checked with Twitter and indeed: Suzy got it once, Damien twice, Darragh twice, Lexia twice, and Redmum also twice.

I believe, campers, that we call this Yahtzee!

Just to be clear, I don’t mind at all when people use my contact form to contact me. I do mind, however, when people use it as a dumbwaiter for delivering piping hot spam direct to a random Inbox. And I particularly mind it when the communication attempt is as wildly inept as Elias’ was:

• If you want to contact me, have the courtesy to actually figure out my name and address me. (BIG HINT: My name is IN MY URL.) It helps to foster the illusion that this is at least a little bit about me and not all about you.
• The email has six links to six different sites within it. You have my attention for less than thirty seconds; give me ONE PLACE to go.
• It has no specific call to action. Again, you have my attention for less than thirty seconds; give me ONE THING to do.

A good pitch email just isn’t that hard to put together. And when you’re sending it to hundreds or thousands of bloggers, each one vocal and each one carting around their own personal soapbox, it’s particularly important that you get it right.

As I pointed out to Elias when I wrote back to him, if you spend half as much time copywriting your email as you do trawling for random bloggers to send it to, you’re much more likely to end up with a pitch that doesn’t suck out loud.

Elias replied to tell me that this wasn’t spam, that he picked me to write to because of the Ladies Tea party post; apparently, he loves women and thinks we’re the best thing ever. (I’m sure Damien and Darragh will be totally flattered to hear that.) And apparently, my little missive has broken him as a man:

I can’t believe you think my pitch suck :-( u just put a huge crack on my heart :-(

And so, courtesy of Suzy, I leave this as consolation for poor Elias:

Online advertising in Ireland is, frankly, an expensive pain in the arse. There are very few venues where advertisers can directly place ads, and when you’re trying to match the venue to your client’s product so the ad is well-niched, the pool shrinks considerably.

On top of that, advertising driven websites here are selling ad space in their ridiculously laden sidebars at a CPM rate of €10 and up – that’s €10 or more for every 1,000 times your ad is shown. Some of these sites have a click-through rate of .06%, which means that for every person who finally clicks your ad, you’ve paid a whopping €16.66. My response to that is “fuck right off. ”

For this reason, I like Facebook. Facebook is universally reviled for having the worst click-thru rate in the industry at an average of .04%, but here’s the thing: I don’t care. I’m not being charged per impression; I’m being charged per click. I don’t care that an ad was viewed 50,000 times before it got a single click – I care that I got a total of 606 clicks at an average cost of 24 cents each.

Compare 24 cents to €16.66, and you’ll start liking Facebook, too.

For its sins, Facebook allows a very nice level of targeting – country, age, gender, relationship status, orientation, and as a bonus, you can further refine by keywords in people’s interests profiles. That’s a real strength.

It also has a lot of drawbacks, so it can work well for some kinds of campaigns and not so well for others:

• It’s bouncy. The bounce rate off Facebook click thrus is very high. For a client with a bounce rate normally in the 30s, we saw bounce rates in the mid-60s from Facebook.
• It doesn’t convert. Trying to sell product off Facebook ads has resulted in a uniformly abysmal goal conversion rate and the ROI is crap. Non-financial goals do better.
• The billing is shit. Seriously shit. There’s no company name on the irritating daily email receipts, and no sniff of a VAT receipt either.

Having said all of that, I still like Facebook for some purposes. It’s great for:

• Pure traffic. If all you need to do is raise your visitor numbers, Facebook will deliver. They serve a massive number of pages, so even at a 0.04% click thru rate, you’ll see as much traffic as you’re willing to pay for.
• Brand Awareness. You only get charged when someone clicks, so as far as I’m concerned, the last batch of ads I ran got my client’s brand in front of people 742,000 times for free.
• Targeted Ads: If you desperately want to target gay people, married women, or men between 25 and 35 with a stated interest in Battlestar Galactica, Facebook can be very precise within the available parameters.

And frankly, even if Facebook was entirely shite, I’m still not paying €16.66 per click. As one client pointed out, “I’d be better off standing on a street corner and offering passers by a tenner to step into my shop.”

I like VistaPrint – I’m all about the cheap and cheerful. Because I do regular print runs, I subscribe to their annoying sale emails, since once in a while I actually want to avail myself of a discount offer.

This is what this past week’s promotional mails from VistaPrint look like in my Inbox:

• 19 November: 10 great November benefits for you, Sabrina!
• 20 November: 34 FREE products + 12 discounts = get started now!
• 22 November: Save 100% 12 times over – Last 24 hours!
• 24 November: FREE! FREE! FREE! (Postage too!)

To be perfectly honest, I’m normally so blind to these near-daily missives that I really couldn’t tell you if their subject lines were substantially different a year or even a month ago. But what I can tell you is that in the present climate we’re watching everyone from banks to airlines go under, and consumers are particularly sensitive to the scent of circling vultures.

At this point I’m fully expecting tomorrow’s email to be titled FOR THE LOVE OF GOD WILL YOU PLEASE JUST ORDER SOMETHING FROM US!!!!!!!!!

For the record, I do not think there’s any kind of financial issue at VistaPrint. But I do think you want to be particularly careful about your sale messaging in this climate.

I actually need to print business cards. But I’m holding out for the offer that comes with the free pony.