Introduction to E-Commerce

Sample Lesson - Introduction

Lesson 2.07: Spam, Spam, Ugly Spam

You've got to be spamming us.
(Source)

Spam. It's many things to many people. Maybe you live by the Spam Museum and your opinion on spam's much nicer than other people's.

Or maybe it's worse than other people's.

When it comes to e-commerce, though, spam isn't quite as museum-worthy. At least, not in a good way. It usually just leaves people feeling sad and angry. For such an innocent word, it sure has built itself a bad reputation. Just the other day, we heard people on the street yelling:

• Go spam yourself.
• What a load of spam.
• Oh, for spam's sake.
• You've got a lot of spam, buddy.

It isn't pretty. That spam museum might even be suffering just from the negative feelings toward online spam. When you send an email to customers, you don't want to send them something they'll want to turn into a curse word. We'll show you how.

And it won't even take any canned meat to do it.

Sample Lesson - Reading

Reading 2.2.07a: When Marketers Behave Badly

If someone hacks your email or website, bad things can happen. But if you're an e-commerce content provider and you want to show off your goods and services, you, too, can be the source of the problem.

Victims can be perpetrators too, you know. It all depends on the context.

When you send emails to massive numbers of people without their explicit permission, you're sending them spam. Sure, it might sound like an easy way to show off the goods you want to sell, but it's only going to annoy the people you were trying to sell to. You, the e-commercian, can violate the privacy of the very people you want to build a relationship, like:

• customers.
• subscribers.
• Facebook likers and lovers.
• Twitter followers.
• good friends who are just trying to enjoy some aesthetic pictures and trippy memes on Tumblr, thankyouverymuch.

If you do violate peoples' privacy, you can hurt your business and even get in legal trouble with the feds. That's right: Spam's actually illegal, but even if it wasn't, it's just bad business.

If you start sending massive amounts of emails to tons of people, chances are good that a lot of them won't want those emails. If they don't want them, they're going to mark them in their inboxes as "spam." When enough people do that, their email's spam filter is going to learn that your email's probably spam, which means all the people who might actually want your email aren't going to see it because it landed in the spam folder.

Not good.

Let's go through the laundry list of potential problems, shall we?

Buying Emails

Don't do it. Just don't. It's illegal and unethical. In fact, it's pretty much the textbook definition of spam, and we all know just how much people hate the stuff. You're buying yourself a ticket to the spam folder when you buy people's emails. They never even thought about signing up for that email, so you can be sure they'll send it straight to spam.

Opt-in Versus Opt-out

No matter how you slice it, a promotional email's actually, legitimately illegal if you don't give people a way to back out of the mailing list.

For real. It's called the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003.

Those politicians sure do know how to make a good acronym, don't they?

To avoid doing something unethical (and, oh yeah, illegal), you'll need a way to let people get out of emails. Luckily, most email list providers like MailChimp and Constant Contact automatically have that feature built in if you sign up with them.

If you don't, you'll need to do it on your own.

Watch Your Words

Be careful with your words. At their core, spam filters are bots that look at the actual words in your email and decide how likely it is that those words belong to a spam email.

Google actually does this too when you try adding unrelated words into your website. Back in the day, spammers would attempt to throw in random words to make their sites show up in searches without being relevant to the actual search. Google caught on and added in some algorithms to catch this kind of spamming.

Searchers don't like it, Google doesn't like it, and you shouldn't do it. Sound good? Good.

Sample Lesson - Reading

Reading 2.2.07b: When Your Email Makes You Gag

Email can be stressful.

Think about it. You buy something from a website. The thing arrives and you're feeling pretty good. Suddenly, you're hit with an email showing you more things you can buy. After that, you get the email asking for your opinion. Then comes the one addressing you by name and making a brand-specific suggestion. You didn't ask for it and yet here it is—an inbox stuffed with spam. Now you probably never want to hear from that website again, even though you did really like that cool whats-a-ma-hoojit you bought.

Back to you as the e-businessperson.

To avoid these unwanted promotional emails, you need to make it crystal clear to shoppers that they have a choice between getting emails and not getting emails. They can opt in to receive emails by checking a box. If you automatically assume every shopper wants emails without giving them a way to opt out, you're on a one-way ticket to getting caught in the spam filter.

It just isn't good business.

Arguably, no one intends to make spam, but it happens anyway. Even if you aren’t running an e-business, you could be sending people emails that they don't care about and unwittingly creating non-customers.

Check out this New York Times article by Abby Ellin. It explores the blurry boundary between true spam and email that's just plain unwanted.

While you're reading, think about what bothers the writer about different emails, what kinds of email she finds objectionable, and what kind of rules you'd need to follow to keep your emails from becoming…

[pause for dramatic effect]

Spam.

Sample Lesson - Activity

Activity 2.07: They Can't Believe It's Not Spam

You can follow all those nicely bulleted points from MailChimp in the first reading, but people can still consider your email spam. What's a good Shmooper to do? Think critically about what makes spam, of course.

How about a compare-contrast essay with Spam the canned ham? To begin with, they can both be sent in the mail.

Okay, you won't actually be doing that, but you will be thinking critically about emails, both sent and received, in the form of a 450- to 700-word persuasive essay.

Step One

Take about 15 – 20 minutes to brainstorm the kinds of emails you like and the ones you don't. Think about:

• what makes an email you want to read.
• what makes an email you'd rather send right to the trash.
• what makes the two different (i.e. what's comparable and contrastable between those two types of emails).

After you've thought about it, go take another 10 – 15 minutes to root through some old emails in your inbox. Find:

• three that you wanted to open right away.
• three that make you want to throw away your Internet.

Jot down some notes analyzing why you like the first three and hate the second three. You'll be needing that information soon.

Step Two

Start building a case for the distinctions you're making between spam and not-spam. Start by talking about what Abby Ellin from that NYT article said was spammy but not technically spam. Tell us what you agree or disagree with. Do her thoughts make sense to you, or is there something you find more important?

Once you're done comparing her argument with your own, make sure that your paragraph ends with a one-sentence summary opinion on what makes spam spammy. You can change it later if you need to, but this'll be your working thesis statement for your essay.

Boom, just like that.

Step Three

Example time. Pull out those example emails from before and pick two:

• one that best shows what you love in a good email
• one that best shows what you hate in a bad email

Underneath the introductory paragraph you just wrote, introduce your favorite email and analyze why you like it so much. This paragraph should have two to three specific examples from that email. When we say "example," we're looking for:

• direct quotes from the email.
• an explanation of the context of the quote.
• a solid analysis of that quote and why you wanted us to read it.

Once you've got that paragraph down, rinse and repeat with the email you hate before moving on to the next step.

Step Four

You've given due attention to both the lovable and loathsome emails. In a fourth paragraph, compare the email you hate with MailChimp's guidelines for not sending spam.

Look for one or two rules given by MailChimp that your hated email breaks. For example, they discuss timeliness in the article. Maybe your hated email was from a company who you ordered sneakers from back in '06 and they're just now hitting up their mailing lists.

Write in a quote and analysis to prove that the email breaks that rule. It's the only way to convince us.

Step Five

Here comes the conclusion. In your fifth and final paragraph, tell us again what that summarizing idea is, remind us how you came to that idea (…through your example emails), and then tell us how you think email marketing could be improved to avoid dreaded emails. How does spam affect email marketing? What should you do to make sure your emails don't get sent straight to the trash? That's the whole point of analyzing good and bad emails, after all.

Once you've got 450 – 700 persuasive words about what makes email good or bad, submit it below. Nice work.