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The West's Wild Internet
by: Kenneth J. McCormick

By
Kenneth J. McCormick
Webmaster
Http://Aboutfacts.net


In the old days, in what has become known as the Wild West, there were people who would try and sell you 'medicine' that could not only cure any ailment you had, and it could also be used as paint remover, furniture polish and clear your pipes. They would put on a little show first and this was the medicine show. After the show was finished they would hawk the bottles of 'medicine' to the audience. There were also other scams that were perpetrated upon the uneducated and not so uneducated settlers like selling them phony gold mines. The sellers would go out and toss a few gold nuggets around the mine for the unsuspecting prospective buyers to see. This was called salting the mine. Then there was the less sophisticated approach of getting a miner drunk and just stealing any gold he had. The law was hard to find and many places had no law at all.


Boy its a lucky thing that this kind of stuff doesn't happen any more and we have laws to protect us. But is this really true? I am afraid not, not all of it anyway. Welcome to the Wild Internet. There are so many scams out there that we would have to classify them by type. Here are a few types:


1. Electronic Bunko
2. Invasion
3. Electronic Deception
4. Destruction


Electronic Bunko is pretty simple. You get an email that states that the author of the mail was given your name as someone that can be trusted. It goes on to say that he is either a member of a royal family of some country, or a cabinet member, or a person in high authority of some institution. He says that someone, usually a deposed ruler has money in off shore banks. The amount is usually stated as something like $20,000,000 or so. He has a problem and that is he is being watched and can't withdraw the money. But since your name was given to him as an honest person, if you withdraw the funds, you either get to keep 1/3 rd or 1/2. As the scheme progresses they will need some sort of good faith money but they tell you not to worry because they will hold it for you. I hate to say this but you wonder how any person can fall for such bull? Apparently this scam must work because they send out millions of these emails and I am sure that they wouldn't waste their time if some people weren't biting. Another of these scams looks a little more legit at first. They offer to buy something you are selling and tell you that they have an agent in London and the items will be exported to Nigeria. So far so good. The next thing that happens is they tell you that they are owed money by someone else and he is going to pay the bill for them with a check but it will be for the amount they are owed. This amount is always much more than the purchase price. They go on to say that they know you are honest and will send them the change and you don't have to wait for the check to clear because it is good. If you are greedy and don't send the change but send the merchandise they don't care because the check is a forgery. They are hoping that is exactly what you do rather than wait for the check to clear.


Invasion is a little more technical. I am sure that everyone has heard of computer viruses. A program is written and attached to some email or download or is even sent to your computer from some website you visited. It hides itself somewhere on one of your hard drives and just watches everything you type. Unfortunately for you this includes passwords, addresses and just about anything else. That this wouldn't do anyone much good except for the other thing it does. It sends the information, periodically, back over the internet to the creator of the malicious program.He even gets all the names and addresses of your friend and contacts because this program probably reads you email lists also.


Electronic Deception. There are at least two kinds of electronic deception that come to my mind. They are both dangerous but the most dangerous of the two is webroot. A program goes onto your computer and then hides itself. It intercepts all outgoing data and if it sees that its size or name is going to be listed, it hides this info so that you can't tell it is there. It can't be detected by anti virus programs or any other detection software yet, except for a very special program available from Microsoft called Root Kit Revealer which checks every storage device on your computer or by the Blacklight Rootkit Eliminator which looks in the directories that it thinks that it is most likely to be in. The program has hundreds of phony links to counterfeit sites that look just like the real thing. If you bank online for example, you will be sent to a site that looks exactly like your bank site and once you type in your id and password, you are dead. Your bank account is emptied almost immediately. Even if your bank has safeguards to prove its the legitimate site, they usually show after you type in your info and then its too late. This is so bad, it could end all electronic transactions. Its sad really, we now have the chance for convenience that was not even dreamed of a few years ago but criminals all over the world seem to be operating with impunity on the wild internet. The second deception involves email. You are sent an email that states that you have had some transaction on a site like PayPal or a banking site. You think you will outsmart these guys if it is a fraud so you open your browser, type in the address of PayPal or the bank in question, sign on and you see that the info you were given wasn't true. You feel really good. What you don't realize is that you did exactly what was expected of you. The email had a small program attached that read the address you typed into the browser then read your id and password and sent them back to the author. Cleaned out again!


Both of these programs get on your computer in various ways. Email, Websites, Downloads etc. So not only are these creeps ruining your ability to conduct your financial affairs online but they are making you afraid to go to websites that you don't know, thus ruining your enjoyment of the web.


Destruction. This really makes no sense to me because there is no monetary gain involved. This is the passing of destructive viruses around the interned for the purpose of outdoing some other virus author and destroying all the data on your machine. I myself get attacked about 2-3 times a week and if it wasn't for my good virus protection I would be forever reformatting my hard drives. Most attacks are email attacks but they certainly are not limited to that. Some of the viruses contain juvenile messages that my virus is more powerful than yours or some such message. This kind of program has been known to cause havoc and tremendous expense to many companies, not to mention the heartache caused to private citizens.


From the perspective of the private person it seems that nothing is being done about the most visible scams. They have been coming in emails for years now. I am referring to what I labeled as Electronic Bunko. Even the messages haven't changed much in that time. I wonder if anyone in the government, either on the highest level or in law enforcement even cares? They might, but no one has shown that they do yet. If the easy stuff is running wild how can we expect anything to be done about the more complicated issues of Electronic Deception or Destruction?


Yes folks the Wild West still lives, only now it is known as the West's Wild Internet and instead of duping one person at a time, thousands of people are being ruined at once with malevolent software applications.


Copyright � 2005 by About Facts Net and its licensors. All rights reserved.


Permission is granted to post this article with changes as long as any links are kept intact.

About the author:

Ken is the webmaster of Http://Aboutfacts.net
About Facts Net is a free internet magazine. It contains many interesting articles often accompanied by photos, video and/or audio. It is suitable for family viewing.


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Tips to Build Your Email Address Database

WHY BUILD YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS DATABASE?

Gaining your customers' email addresses will:

  • Provide an additional channel for reaching your customers
  • Increase the ROI of your marketing investments
  • Significantly reduce your customer acquisition and marketing costs
  • Allow you to easily measure the impact of your marketing campaigns
  • Increase your customer participation and retention rates

With ongoing postal and telemarketing pressures impacting marketing budgets for many organizations this year, email marketing could become the "silver lining " for many marketers.   But how do you create a successful email marketing campaign if you do not have a substantial email database?  That question may be one of the largest Internet related challenges facing companies this year.

Research shows that the majority of organizations have email addresses for less than 10% of their postal files.  So how do you level the playing field and start to add quality permission - based email addresses to your database?

Here are some tips that you can use to cost effectively build your email address database and increase your customer participation and retention rates: 


START TO ASK FOR IT!  

Every communication or touch point with a customer should start or end with a request for an email address.   By utilizing the four points below, you should be able to add email addresses for 5% to 10% of your postal file over the course of one year.

1.  Direct Mail Collection

Think about how much time and money you spent for copy and design on your last new direct mail piece.  Most companies have started to ask their customers for their email address information within these mailings.  This is a great step forward. However, companies need to look at one major improvement if they want to increase their email address collection rates. 

To date, most requests for email address information have been pushed, shoved or jammed into whatever white space remains.  It should be no surprise that the success rate has been less than stellar.

To improve on these efforts, you need to provide your members with a reason to release their email addresses to you.  E-newsletters, purchase confirmations, petitions, and special discounts and offers are but a few of the benefits that will encourage your members to come on board.

2.  Web Page Collection

Many companies have an email address collection function in place via the web.  To improve your sign-up rates, add text below the email request box that informs your visitors of the special email benefits that they will receive (i.e. e-newsletters, purchase confirmations, delivery updates, etc.) upon registering.  You can also utilize a pop-up link to inform users of these special benefits.

Finally, your email address request function should be available on your home page. Don't make your users go and look for it.  Every click away from your home page reduces the chances of your users taking an action and providing you with their email address information.

3.  Existing Email Database Collection

Don't forget to ask the members of your existing customer base for email addresses of their friends, family and associates.  Viral marketing is a powerful tool to use and is extremely cost effective!  You could ask them either to provide you with additional addresses or simply to pass on your newsletter, email specific offers, or other information to others they feel have similar interests.

4.  Telemarketing Collection

Don't assume that your telemarketing agents are asking for email addresses from potential customers.  Ensure that your agents have an updated script, which outlines the previously described benefits to potential customers of providing their email addresses.

The suggestions above are a great start!  Yet they really should be viewed as a secondary plan for building your email database.  To exponentially and expeditiously grow your email database, please read on!


EMAIL APPENDING  

Utilizing an email appending service enables you to add email addresses for up to 25% of your postal file, all within 3-4 weeks.

Email Appending - is the process of adding an individual's email address to that individual's postal record in side your existing database.  This is accomplished by matching the postal database against a third party, permission based database of postal and email address information.

Best Practices - Email Appending is not a prospecting tool. The DMA (Direct Marketing Association) and its interactive arm AIM (Association of Interactive Marketing) have guidelines in place that dictate that email appending only be used to append email addresses to your existing opt-in postal record house file.

The Process - Your opt-in postal file is securely transferred to an email appending provider, who will do an initial gross email address match of your file against its opt-in database of postal and email address records.  Your appending provider will then send these matches a permission-based message prepared by you.  All bounces and opt-out requests will be removed from the list.  At that point a valid permission-based email address file of your customers will be delivered back to you. 

Cost - Less than the price of a postal stamp!


IN SUMMARY

The first step of any successful email marketing effort is to build a permission-based email address list of your customers.  The simplest, quickest and most cost-effective way to do this is through email appending, which will enable you to add email addresses for up to 25% of your postal file.  Secondary efforts of email address collection via focused direct mail, web, viral and telemarketing practices are also important and will enable you to add email addresses for an additional 5% to 10% of your base on an annual basis.

Best of luck in building your email address database.  As many companies have already learned, the ROI and cost savings to be achieved will far exceed your expectations.

Bill Kaplan
CEO
FreshAddress, Inc.

FreshAddress, Inc., The Email Address ExpertsTM, provides a comprehensive suite of industry leading database and email deliverability services to help companies increase their e-commerce revenues.  For more information on how we can help "Build and Update" your email list, visit http://freshaddress.com/biz or email biz@freshaddress.com.



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