A reader sent me a mailer they received through my I Buy Junk Mail program.
Year after year I’ve written about such debt relief emails as you can see below. I’m not even going to draw nifty little arrows to areas that concern me. Instead, I’m going to let you leave your feedback and observations in the comments section below about the mailer and any issues you can spot that raise some marketing concerns.
Click on the mailer below to see a larger version that will be easier to read.
Steve: This is a great exercise to help us identify questionable marketing pieces. Here are the red flags I see: 1) There are several typos – in example, under the box on the lower right it says “program fees extra and very” (I am sure they meant vary). Next, there are double “periods” after the disclaimer and several other points of punctuation are missing in the disclaimer. Quality companies proof read their marketing very carefully and never send out pieces like this. 2) The website referenced is meaningless – yes it exists but it offers no information. It’s just one page! And there is a typo on the website. 3) The mailing just names creditors and is fishing – hoping that by naming creditors, the recipient might think the mailing is relevant to them in particular. I doubt they have any real information on the recipient and are just mailing anyone, hoping for a bite.
I do exercises like this with my Mom all the time especially with email and telephone marketing. She has learned to look up toll free numbers on Google and to inspect suspicious emails by examining the grammar carefully and “hovering” the mouse cursor over any links to see where they actually go! After a couple years of learning how to spot scams, she is getting very good.
Thanks.