New form of Guerilla Marketing: “Reply All Advertising”

Written on 27th November 2008                                                                                                              7 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur

Know these messages? You open them and the first thing you see is a HUGE list of addresses in the TO or CC field? Don’t you hate that? And after you get the first one it seems like 50% of all recipients start replying too and also don’t know the difference between the REPLY and the REPLY ALL buttons?

Well, it seems that some people have found a way to turn a bad thing into a good thing.

Someone recently confided a secret to me which I’m happily sharing with you here. This person has been taking advantage of less technical people at conferences, popular websites and other larger groups who accidentally send a mail to all their contacts and use the TO field instead of the BCC field.

What you do is simply hit the REPLY ALL button as soon as you get one of these messages and, like you don’t know what you are doing, write “Hey thanks for the message! Have I told you about my new project at http://domain.com?” and send that message.

Cruel? Yes.
Effective? Yes!
Why? Read on…

It is a simple way to spam (and yes, it IS spam) a bunch of people with your personal message without risking much. Even if people are annoyed they will blame the first person sending out that mail more than they blame you for replying.

Another great side-effect is that by replying to all you make the whole thing even more embarrassing for the original sender. The more embarrassment you pile on the higher the changes are that they will never make the same mistake again.

I haven’t used this form of marketing and don’t think I have the guts to do it. What do you think? And what should we call this form of personal promotion? Carbon Copy Communication? Reply All Advertising? Re-direct-mail?

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