Bingo Card Abuse & What to Do About It
Are you a B2B marketer using ads in trade magazines that collect sales leads for you via their “bingo” cards inserted in each issue? Turns out some very uncool spam vigilantes are abusing bingo cards — whenever they get spammed, they in turn sign up the spammer as a sales prospect who’s checked every box on the bingo card requesting info from advertisers. Then the spammer is inundated with direct mailed pitches from all those companies.
Sherpa reader, Tony Manso of PhotoLibrarian.com is a reformed one-time spammer who got slammed this way. Typical of many marketers new to online, when he started marketing he naively gathered a bunch of prospect’s email addresses he found online, not realizing that you should get personal permission before you email people.
Then, as he says, ” By the time I got out about 30,000 emails I had gotten numerous phone calls and emails from angry recipients, got booted by my web host, got booted by my isp, listed on a “known spammer” list, and for the next 2 months I received a stack of postal mail about a FOOT THICK EVERY DAY from just about every company in the country that sends free information about their products.” Self-titled ‘spam cops’ had sent in the bingo cards in his name from dozens of tech trade magazines with every box ticked.
Manso continues,“It’s been over 2 years since that spam run and I’m still getting direct mail from some of the vendors. I literally had to call each of these companies and tell them to stop sending me stuff that I didn’t ask for, since the postage on most of these packages I was getting was over $2.00 and I can’t even begin to imagine how many hundreds of “spammers” these things are being sent to. Incidentally, when I called the companies who were sending me postal mail, EVERY ONE OF THEM told me that I was like the 100th person they talked to that week who said the same thing to them.”
Action item: if you are a b2b marketer who could be affected by these uncool vigilantes who are abusing the opt-in information request forms in trade magazines to slam spammers, you should contact your ad sales reps today and make sure publishers put a system into place that only sends you leads when a few of the boxes on bingo cards are marked. If every box is ticked, it’s likely a con, or a worthless tire-kicker prospect. Don’t let publishers foist no-good leads on you.
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