Mortgages, Loans, and Spam

A recent eMarketer article reports that almost 80% of all spam fits into 2 categories: healthcare (ie diet pills and viagra) and finance (mortages, loans, and stock tips).

What’s interesting is that finance spam only accounted for 15.8% of spam in January 2004, but has soared to 37.8% in April. Whether this is a trend or just high volume around tax season remains to be seen.

While anyone with email can probably vouch for the accuracy of this, but this does present an interesting challenge to legitimate mortgage lenders who may want to reach their clients through email. The vast majority of spammers have no ties to mortgage lenders, yet make outrageous claims to get responses. (For more on this, see the Wharton School’s “Mortgage Professor”, Jack Guttentag’s informative website)

With spam filters set to filter out key words like “debt” and “mortgage” and “refinance”, mortgage lenders and brokers may find a rather large percentage of their emails are ending up in junk folders or being deleted before delivery.

What to do? Unfortunately, probably not much, depending on the type of reader on your email list. You can specifically ask them to create a filter that keeps your mail out of the junk bin, but you don’t have much control over whether they do. Double opt-in newsletters can also help because they send email to the subscriber to confirm his subscription. If he receives that confirmation email, chances are good that he will probably receive your other email. You might consider having a back up plan, such as a print copy of your newsletter or simply a link that says to read this month’s newsletter, please visit our website.

Or you can take the spammer approach and substitute characters for high risk keywords - “m*rtg%ges” anyone?