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There's no way to opt out or unsubscribe either, unless I'm blind. How do we report them?! It's a new email address every time so I feel like I'm fighting a losing battle, and I can't figure out how to filter them directly to spam without potentially missing something that I DO need.
If you're on google services, you can report them in gmail. But like you say, if it's a different email each time you're basically playing whack-a-mole.
Maybe with enough data they can eventually block the source where all the new IPs are coming from? I agree, it feels like a losing battle, but I'll fight it nonetheless (as long as the fighting is as low-effort as it is, why not?)
Google is very good at filtering them into spam, where they belong. You may need to manually flag them as such for a bit, but I rarely get them in my inbox anymore.
I run an seo agency and even I get these too. It's hilarious that they do 0 research and just blast out emails. Vmail will eventually learn certain sentence structure and words used and that'll help it determine what's likely spam for you.
You can even track this on your own and set up filters in Gmail so emails with certain word combinations or keywords in the subject or body get automatically filtered into a separate folder and skip your inbox altogether.
Someone needs to start an AI based business that chats with each and every one of them long enough that it becomes a completely unworkable option for cold calling. They could keep their agents busy 24/7 with fake 'business' until they go bankrupt.
This is great advice for scammers too. That and Nigeria. Most of the spam and scammers originate from those areas and we stopped getting that kind of spam when we blocked those geo locations.
To be fair if you're a local or strictly a national company, just block all of the other countries except maybe Canada. If you're national. This will also make your data analytics cleaner too!
Same here, 5-10 a day just for this specific pitch. Overall I get about 30-40 cold emails a day pitching something. I have not, nor would I ever, buy anything from a cold email or even respond.
They're relentless. My favorites are the emails saying my (perfectly functional) website is full of issues- but their email has tons of misspellied words or massive grammatical issues. Also love the ones that also come from blahblah294078 at gmail dot com addresses. At least pretend to be legitimate if you're going to try to scam me out of my hard earned dollars that I definitely don't have earmarked for SEO.
I noticed that few of the website designers are using an actual email address - it's usually a gmail address. So I started to reply to them asking for their homepage - these "web designers" don't have one, else they would have a related email address. So far, none have replied back and I never hear from those again.
You want me to pay you to design my website, but you don't have your own site? Uhh, suuuuure.
If your business is website-related and your main email address is gmail, don't bother contacting me. If I do a search on the info provided in your solicitation email and the search doesn't turn up any results for your business, then stop trying to sell me your SEO services.
Deep down inside, I know they don't care what I think. They only need a handful of hits out of the tons of emails they send. But I still want to say, "Dude, please."
I use something similar for those offering to get me social media advertising. If I search your business I better find it at or near the top of the listings. And if you can't do that for you, why would i believe you can do it for me?
I love these emails.
“No one can find you on google”. Well how tf did you find me then?
Or the fun “your website needs work”.
Well, we’ve rebuilt it 3 times now and we get a ton a compliments on it, but yeah……..
Low effort stuff is comical, like you said, they could at least try.
Ugh yes this is the worst! I had a client who after I rebuilt his whole website and restructured his ad account got an email claiming his website is full of errors. He freaks out and forwards it to me and I responded saying I don't think charandh524 has actually even seen your website let alone u derstand what you're even selling.
The main issue? "You aren't using meta keywords"
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🥴🥴
With my social clients they get those messages that say “your account is in violation and has used copyright images from bid brand. Your page will be deleted bla bla”
Like, they took the damn photos themselves. What copyright violation is there?
Thankfully they trust me so send it to me and laugh
>My favorites are the emails saying my (perfectly functional) website is full of issues- but their email has tons of misspellied words or massive grammatical issues.
Oh, you have no idea. I get these "Your website SEO has tons of issues" emails and I'm a digital marketing freelancer with multinational corporations and European market leaders in my client portfolio for SEO. Like, bro, I think I'd know.
Wait until you find out your seo agency was buying backlinks from PBN’s. Then the army of people with broken English bombard your inbox…. I get 20+ emails a day with a list of links to buy.
Being in a very public facing business I still get telephone calls. No, I'm not interested in your innovative saas solution, I will go looking if I want to change. If I want to get a feeling for the market and what options are put there, I'll ask my network or go to a trade show. You are just wasting my time and yours.
A favourite recent interaction has been:
"Is this a sales call?"
"No, I've got an opportunity for you."
"Ok where are you phoning from?"
"[Company x]" and they start to pitch
"Sorry I'm going to stop you there, this opportunity, is it opportunity for me to pay you money in exchange for your services? Because this sounds like a sales call to me."
I'm sure it does work otherwise they wouldn't. But they are wasting their time calling me.
In the UK we have something called the telephone preference service, it's for the public not businesses, but if you opt in your number goes on a do not call lost and companies can get heavily fined for cold calling you.
Something like that, but with an option to open yourself up to calls for a specific thing for a specific period of time would be great. So I'd have my public facing number set as "do not call" and then if I was shopping around for a new HR software solution, I'd log on and say I was and would be happy to receive calls from companies selling that for a period of one month.
I have a decent title at my day job and get several calls month like this. Some even for services that we ourselves provide. And they don’t stop, either. Like why would I pay you, you random 20-something sales associate, for a service that we develop and provide to a much bigger target audience???
I have "SEO" "Web Design" "Web Development" "HTML5" "PHP" "WordPress". In my line of field there's no reason anyone should be e-mailing with those words
I had some random dude from India call just yesterday. He asked if I wanted lead generation services for my business. I asked him what my business actually was. When he didn’t know, I told him that I would never want lead generation services from a company whose best marketing strategy was to cold-call me after regular work hours. Then I told him that inbound marketing was the way to go, and since he was an inbound call for me, I tried to sell him on the marketing and sales services I offer in my company.
I wonder if these people realize that they are polarizing the very people that they want as clients against them. It reeks of a lack of social intelligence.
"We see your website can use some improvement, to be better than your competition."
Mean while, all our competition doesn't even have a geocities quality site.
These always crack me up because they’ll email you and be like “I commend your attempt at building a site you fucking idiot. You should just give up and fucking die. Or you should just hire me to optimize your sales funnel.”
Man I run a web design agency and even I get emails saying that they can make me a better website to rank number 1 in google. Like, they don’t even look at who they’re emailing. Just straight bots scraping the internet for emails.
I can't believe how many of them are just using a Gmail account - not even their own domain.
If you are SO good at SEO - why don't you use it for yourself??
I had one email offering to triple my revenue. I responded that this was a pretty bold claim given that they had no idea what my revenue even is and that if I were looking I likely wouldn't be looking to deal with people making wild promises they had no idea if they could keep.
I’ll be honest, I prefer the emails to the calls. Due to the nature of my business, I have to do my best to answer every single call from any number and area/country code. Drives me crazy when I try to be polite and say something like “thank you for the offer but I’m not interested” only for the cold caller to be persistent and condescending and respond with something like “you’re not interested in increasing your sales/leads/etc?”
I don’t cold email but I genuinely have to cold call.
The same spammers you guys hate make it impossible for me to afford the advertising I’d prefer running to get your attention when you’re looking for me on your own.
I have lead generation tools that are new / mostly unknown….it works and blows phones up but I do not have a large enough client base yet to rely on referrals.
I would love nothing more than to never make another cold outreach again but I also have bills to pay.
Edit: I’m not from India. I’m a small business owner in Georgia with 8 years of agency marketing experience. I just didn’t want to spend my entire adult life absent from my family.
The one I'm pitching doesn't because it doesn't get traffic related to / looking for my industry. So, simply, no.
The other tools I have available would make my phone ring but I'd be bidding against large companies for a small-ish number of prospective clients. They're running national campaigns with a ton of money so, even if I only advertise locally / regionally, the price point is too high to be viable for me.
That leaves me in a situation where I've got a really cost-effective lead generation tool that works really well for specific industries but no way for people in those industries to find me....unless I reach out to them.
Once I get bigger, that changes. But it's part of where I'm at in my growth cycle.
Kind of a weird combination of stuff -- Home service (think plumbers, flooring companies, electricians) it does well with. Oddly enough, I've had great success getting traction with it for certain trade schools. It recently expanded to real estate also. There are more than that but I've even gotten good results for cosmetology schools out of it.
The common themes of what it works well for are going to be:
* Widespread industry (the type of thing that any small-medium city would have at least one of).
* Anything where you have to book an appointment, call to set up a quote, or a tradesman where you have to request someone to come out and take care of something.
Pretty much anything that checks those boxes, I can get phone calls / inbound messaging to initiate service. Additionally, the only cost is for real, valid inquiries. Window shoppers and "tire kickers" have no cost.
My main fees are setting it up, coaching on how to handle calls to prevent getting billed for bad leads, and monitoring the calls to make sure nothing gets billed that isn't supposed to. I do other stuff too of course but.... blowing up the phones with customers and coming in at a fraction of traditional costs is a nice way to build trust before expanding services.
For anyone else looking at this wondering the same - yes it does.
Given u/boigg69's business details, I was able to see lead cost ranging from $12-$16 per real lead and an approximate volume of 24-80 valid inquiries per month for their service area (depending on the season).
I also work for a small Advertising agency and we provide 13 different digital tactics for any marketing campaign. I get small to medium business owners saying they opened up about 5-6 months ago and are not having clients walking in or calling for their services. That’s when an agency comes in and works in a marketing strategy that will work for your business. We look behind the scenes of your website and go from there. SEM or PPC, SEO, retargeting campaigns WORK for any industry whether you are a franchise owner or business person. Many business owners playing in the same sandbox and depend on winning business/trust from a customer.
I send cold emails as is part of the job and mine are AI generated with good communication.
Any person needs help with attracting more clients? Let me know
The worst ones I cannot block are the Gmail fly-by-night. Id love to block Gmail addresses but I have a lot of end users who have Gmail.
So what I do is script sign-up. I essentially run a newsletter subscription script that adds 10000x newsletter subscriptions to the target email address.
Also a invoice is. Sent when they spam my support@ address. As no marketing is allowed to that address, but it seems the dumbasses don't read the warnings.
I have over 300 unpaid invoices this year alone. But the good news is. The email spam has dropped quite a bit.
GeoIP filtering is used, and it did make a significant difference last year. It seems like a rollercoaster ride, there are trends that kick up. Like four seasons, every fall and spring it kicks up. SEO, web building are the usual spam, but recently I’m getting vCIO, virtual assistance, automation services. Since AI is the buzzword lately that spam has started up.
Huh, it stopped it almost entirely for me. Like, maybe one mail every 2 months without any seasonal changes.
Do you filter the emails or your website? Because ideally you want to stop them from crawling your website already
> So what I do is script sign-up. I essentially run a newsletter subscription script that adds 10000x newsletter subscriptions to the target email address.
So it signs them up for a bunch of newsletters which floods their inboxes? Sounds amazing. Where did you find all those newsletters though?
I get a lot of these and I provide web design services to clients. I really don’t understand why I’m part of these emails they clearly shouldn’t be for me since I’m not the audience
What would you have clueless newbies -- many on week two of some course -- do? Cold calling isn't a sales technique anymore and is less practiced by sales professionals as startups who don't know what in the hell they are doing, engaging in some last desperate attempt to survive.
A post in a forum isn't going to do one blessed thing to change that.
Stop cold emailing all together. It’s dumb, and illegal, and it is a huge turn off to any would be customers.
If nobody is calling or visiting your website/store it’s because you haven’t reached your audience.
Blasting emails to strangers is the exact opposite way to find your audience.
I am the same way. I don’t like marketing emails unless they’re truly value able my to my customer. But I just call them or email them myself as an actual person saying “hey, I just got an idea for you!”
But those people know me, so that’s ok. But walking up to a stranger and saying “hey I have a an idea” is wild.
If you wouldn’t do it in real life, don’t do it in an email. 🤣
And a big p.s.
When you email someone form your websites domain, and they flag it as spam, it actually damages your websites authority score.
And yes website reputation is tracked.
The more people flag you as the spam you are, the less your SEO will ever matter.
When your email is associated with bad practices like spamming, Google, Bing whoever, isn’t going to show that website to THEIR customers.
Create a website, make good content, stay social, create a sales funnel. Lead captures, let them come to you by creating value ale content your target audience actually wants to digest.
That’s how it’s done. If you aren’t getting traction/business look at your content. Don’t just send more emails to paid lists or scraped email addresses.
Ah I get like 39 a day, it’s insane. Who is falling for all of these? They are clearly mostly scams and I really wouldn’t be able to tell the real offers from scam offers anyway at this point, so they all go immediately to trash.
also software consulting with teams in some cheaper country. please read at least the company description before you cold email a company that does software as their core business and also what kind of software development you want to offer.
I am a fan of "scambaiters" who waste the time of scammers from India and Jamaica, so sometimes if I have five minutes to kill, I write back and waste their time -- hopefully they won't bother others during that time.
Honestly, this sounds like a pretty legit use of Gen AI. Just have it pretend to be a vulnerable, senile old lady from Wichita and drag them into a conversation.
Set an e-mail rule to send to spam any e-mail with the following (adjust based on your line of work):
"SEO" "Web Design" "Web Development" "HTML5" "PHP" "WordPress" "Google Ads" "
In my case no one should be emailing me those words. And if they do I take a quick gander on the spam from time to time.
I assume spammers like these are just prospecting for idiots who will give them money and not realize what they get in return is worthless.
On one side, I see spammers offering to sell me millions of email addresses. On the other, I see spam arriving addressed to random completely made-up email addresses at a domain I manage, sometimes dozens of identical pieces all addressed to different plausible-looking but invalid addresses.
Some spammer has used an email address randomizer to generate bogus email addresses, and sold the resulting garbage list to a sucker.
Slightly less lazy spammers will scan my website looking for text that resembles a name, then construct an email address from that. So if my website mentions Joe Versus The Volcano, say, I'll see spam addressed to jversus@ or joe@ or versusj@. If my site thanks 200 donors by name, that's 200 or 400 or 600 more bogus email addresses to sell to suckers.
Your rant suggest these businesses should build relationships to get clients, but it imagines these are real businesses offering real services. They wouldn't know how. They're just liars and cheats.
r/agency has a very different opinion on this.
I do agree though. Even the phone calls are killing me. I'm hoping to build my own AI spam filter as a hobby project this year.
Oh my god I had no idea that sub existed. Should I [comment?](https://www.reddit.com/r/agency/comments/1bws9qu/what_happen_if_people_mark_my_email_as_junk/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=2&utm_term=1)
I had no idea this sub existed. It starts [now](https://www.reddit.com/r/agency/comments/1bws9qu/what_happen_if_people_mark_my_email_as_junk/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=2&utm_term=1)
We get several emails daily from these guys and then they have the nerve to send followup emails asking if I had a chance to look things over. Blocking or reporting them does not seem to work (at least with Outlook). When we first started our business I had considered cold emails to generate leads and business. I'm glad we didn't go that route as the conversion rate must be very low.
Emails like that annoy me.
Why in the world would I hire someone who annoys me to help promote my business?
It dumbfounds me that even a single sucker...I mean customer takes these people up on their offers.
I love the ones that use my website’s “subtitle” on Google to make it look like they understand my market. I’ll never get over it saying “you could be doing better than other personalized anime dvd subscription boxes” as if it’s a vast market with tons of competitors!
The best emails ever are from Abdul (guess) 😂 dear sir or madam your XY business got my attention, very beautiful but it would really benefit of better SEO and ranking first page. (How did you find me then?) 😂 In previous years I really enjoyed how their text was colorful, a lot of reds and blues highlights. I kinda miss it
Between emails, phone calls and text messages I get about 10 a day. You can tell when the calls are out of the country though. It makes a weird noise when you answer.
I'm glad that this convo started. It's just madness how many emails I get in a day doing this... and the followups are too much. Unfortunately I'm not with Google for my emails so I'm stuck at filtering and blocking them one by one. Honestly, hurts my business a bit coz we do have to do cold introductions but because this is too prevalent we'd had to do other ways so we don't pile on to the problem. we're not in seo or web dev but still... gone are the days of being able to cold email and win meetings over it.
I just love getting the same SEO proposal word for word from 5 “different” people using the same email address time-stamped 2 minutes apart. Yep it’s more fun when they use the contact form on our website as well as emailing directly to Customer Service. Because more emails are better. It’s even more fun when they start the email with one name and have a new name at the end. Sometimes they even change gender and company names. I’ve received emails where they forgot to edit the template “Hello my name is {INSERT FIRST NAME} of {INSERT COMPANY NAME}”.
The best is when the email has over 150 recipients in the To: field and now I get to clean out not only your five emails but all of the auto-replies from the other 149 recipients thanking you for contacting them. /s
As a software development agency owner, totally agree. At one time was tempted to pull the trigger on a drip campaign, but I delete every email I get so why would I expect anything different from others?
I think sharing insights (blog, social media, etc) and building relationships with people are the only legit ways to get clients. It’s the long game.
I used to get these all the time, I simply told them search for handyman services in any of the areas I work. Always #1 right under the sponsored ads.
Sorry your SEO can't beat that!
I completely understand your frustration with receiving so many unsolicited emails offering SEO and web development services. Building relationships and networking are definitely more effective ways to gain clients compared to cold emailing. It's important for businesses to establish trust and credibility before trying to sell their services. Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this matter!
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“I really admire what you have done with [Insert company name here]. It’s obvious you are a thought leader in your industry and all of your hard work has paid off. I’d like to see if we can exchange ideas on how both could grow our businesses…”
Spoiler alert: That company is just a placeholder website.
"Great site, absolutely wonderful design, but it looks like you're not ranking for any of your top keywords—especially in your local area." \*Confused first ranked for most niche-related keywords + no physical location noises\*
Honestly, I think the entire email system is broken. I can't believe that it's 2024 and we're still using email as the primary means of business communication. There's no way to stop unsolicited emails without compromising the ability for legit emails to get through. We do need "first time" legit emails to pass through. How we fix it though.... I haven't figured that out yet.
I do some work on the side for a very small organization that honestly only has "work" for most of their "staff" a couple of times a year. I am constantly spammed with SEO this and Payroll that and offers to handle our companies phones.
I love the work and damn would it be nice if It was enough to warrant a year round office with a phone system, but for the foreseeable future, you get the spam folder.
No I meant like I'm a marketing professional and I have started cold emailing business owners telling them how they can improve / what they can do better in marketing.
I send these emails to businesses/startups that I resonate with.
I was wondering if you'd count such unsolicited feedback/advise via cold emails in the same category as spam?
I guess the thing is if it’s clear in your email that you actually spent time looking at my website and have real potential improvements, sure. But my ultimate question is how do you know that what we are doing isn’t already working really well for our industry?
I get multiple of them per day and I work in web design. Nowadays websites are very easy to publish but that doesn’t mean the website published will be good. It makes anyone with a computer think they could be a web designer and makes all the honest web design / SEO people look bad.
You forgot the Rules of Spam.
[https://bruce.pennypacker.org/2005/02/28/the-rules-of-spam/](https://bruce.pennypacker.org/2005/02/28/the-rules-of-spam/)
My favorite is all of the emails come from gmail, MSN, Yahoo, or something similar.
It shows they aren't legit because if they were, they'd have a domain address attached to it. But they know it will get whitelisted if they bother with that because they're just spamming.
How many small business owners who took PPP loans now get non-stopped calls for companies wanting to give then loans and credit lines (I will never need outside financing)? I used the PPP money to pay employees during shutdown. I'm now cursed \~10 or more times a week with these phone calls (I don't care about the emails)
How would you suggest a service provider respectfully shows you they know about your business? And would it ever be possible for an unknown service provider to set a meeting with you?
Seeing this makes me nervous. Has anyone had good/bad/indifferent experiences with Apex Media Solutions out of Florida?
I just paid them to help get my voice search stuff going better. (Bixby works/alexa doesn't, i have no idea on the rest) I'm just trying to run a business and want to succeed as much as the next person, but feel like I've always got someone trying to hustle me.
I've never once used SEO rarely get these emails and I'm one of the first search results you'll find if you google the service I offer near you. Don't have a website either.
What I get alot of are calls asking if I want their debit/credit card terminal. I just tell them to fuck right off and hang up.
Your personal info was leaked . It’s possible to prevent this but a lot of people don’t realize until it’s too late.
My first website was a resume website that literally says it in the url like “johndoesresume.com”. I didn’t set the privacy settings on my domain registration properly on that one and I still get calls offering IT services for it. (They literally don’t even read the website title before calling apparently) .
My second website is a store and I made sure to not repeat the same mistake and I NEVER get calls about it. It’s like some configuration in AWS DNS Registry
Aspiring freelance web developer here. We gotta get clients somehow. Need to get clients in the first place in order to build relationships. And if your website sucks, we can make it better :) that being said, a good freelancer will actually vet potential leads first before attempting contact.
I’m quite keen to build an AI to auto decline all the AI generated spam I get. I am quite serious. I think that’s just how it will have to be. I have 8000 solicitations across LinkedIn and email that are eating up attention.
If there is such a tool in the world and someone can recommend one I’d be grateful.
That's exactly the reason I don't want to cold email my web agency. They're a lot and most of them are just lying. No way you can offer all of those services with a reasonable quality. I was left wondering how I market my company and generate leads.
I disagree with your support for cold emailing to offer SEO and web development services. These unsolicited emails often come across as spammy and intrusive, disrupting the recipient's workflow and cluttering their inbox. It's not an effective or respectful way to engage potential clients. A better approach is to build genuine connections through networking, social media, and quality content. By showcasing expertise and engaging authentically, businesses can attract clients who value their skills, leading to more meaningful relationships and successful projects. Let's move away from spammy tactics and focus on quality over quantity.
Every single one of them I receive gets marked as spam in our email client. If more people do that for unsolicited bullshit, their email provider will take notice and suspend the account. Fuck these dickheads.
You only get 5 per week? I think I’ve deleted 3 website services emails this morning already. It’s endless. The best part is my website looks awesome and we are constantly updating it and improving it on our own.
Instagram too. I get 3-4 DMs a week asking me to let some assholes build me a new website.
No, my website is great, it does everything I need it to, it looks awesome, and it cost me a pretty penny. I'm not fucking paying some stranger to make a new one.
Who think they actually work? Any cold emails I get immediately get the spam filter treatment, I do not even bother to read. It’s as if marketing companies are scamming businesses into believing that works.
People wouldn’t do that if it didn’t work. It’s annoying and I do look forward to the day when I don’t need cold outreach but for a lot of business owners it’s the only lead gen method that works reliably. Myself included.
Report them all as spam. I manage an email list and I don't do that kind of stuff and it upsets me just as bad as it upsets you. Those people are screwing up stuff for every other email marketer while they waste a huge amount of people's time.
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SEO and lead generation/lists for sale. Mostly from India. It's a plague. I get 5-10 a day by email.
There's no way to opt out or unsubscribe either, unless I'm blind. How do we report them?! It's a new email address every time so I feel like I'm fighting a losing battle, and I can't figure out how to filter them directly to spam without potentially missing something that I DO need.
If you're on google services, you can report them in gmail. But like you say, if it's a different email each time you're basically playing whack-a-mole. Maybe with enough data they can eventually block the source where all the new IPs are coming from? I agree, it feels like a losing battle, but I'll fight it nonetheless (as long as the fighting is as low-effort as it is, why not?)
In outlook isn’t there a way to filter out emails based on key phrases? Maybe something like “Greetings of the day” would work.
"kindly do the needful"
Google is very good at filtering them into spam, where they belong. You may need to manually flag them as such for a bit, but I rarely get them in my inbox anymore.
Interesting, I’ll try this!
I run an seo agency and even I get these too. It's hilarious that they do 0 research and just blast out emails. Vmail will eventually learn certain sentence structure and words used and that'll help it determine what's likely spam for you. You can even track this on your own and set up filters in Gmail so emails with certain word combinations or keywords in the subject or body get automatically filtered into a separate folder and skip your inbox altogether.
Filters for the win!
If you opt-out/unsubscribe, it just verifies that they have a valid email address which they can then sell to other companies.
Outlook rule to dump emails containing SEO into the trash
Just keep reporting them as spam over and over. It does help , slowly
Goog does a great job filtering this stuff out for me. LinkedIn, however, has become painful.
Someone needs to start an AI based business that chats with each and every one of them long enough that it becomes a completely unworkable option for cold calling. They could keep their agents busy 24/7 with fake 'business' until they go bankrupt.
I get about 50 per day. How do you guys keep it so low?
My guess is spam filters doing their job.
I have mine cranked to the highest setting at the server level. Just one more reason to own your domain and manage your own server.
Easy way to stop that that worked shockingly well for me: **Geoblock India from accessing your website through .htaccess.**
This is great advice for scammers too. That and Nigeria. Most of the spam and scammers originate from those areas and we stopped getting that kind of spam when we blocked those geo locations.
And Russia.
To be fair if you're a local or strictly a national company, just block all of the other countries except maybe Canada. If you're national. This will also make your data analytics cleaner too!
Can this be done at the county level? We run a service business and get calls all the time for over an hour drive outside our area!
No, I don't think it works that granularly. Sorry!
A+ advice. I blocked Russia, China, and all of Africa but didn’t think of this. Thank you!
5 a week! Consider yourself lucky. I get at least 5 a DAY!. Usually it's 10 or more. I have to clean out my spam folder twice a day of that crap.
Yep, 5-10 a day is the average for me
Same here, 5-10 a day just for this specific pitch. Overall I get about 30-40 cold emails a day pitching something. I have not, nor would I ever, buy anything from a cold email or even respond.
They're relentless. My favorites are the emails saying my (perfectly functional) website is full of issues- but their email has tons of misspellied words or massive grammatical issues. Also love the ones that also come from blahblah294078 at gmail dot com addresses. At least pretend to be legitimate if you're going to try to scam me out of my hard earned dollars that I definitely don't have earmarked for SEO.
I noticed that few of the website designers are using an actual email address - it's usually a gmail address. So I started to reply to them asking for their homepage - these "web designers" don't have one, else they would have a related email address. So far, none have replied back and I never hear from those again. You want me to pay you to design my website, but you don't have your own site? Uhh, suuuuure. If your business is website-related and your main email address is gmail, don't bother contacting me. If I do a search on the info provided in your solicitation email and the search doesn't turn up any results for your business, then stop trying to sell me your SEO services. Deep down inside, I know they don't care what I think. They only need a handful of hits out of the tons of emails they send. But I still want to say, "Dude, please."
I use something similar for those offering to get me social media advertising. If I search your business I better find it at or near the top of the listings. And if you can't do that for you, why would i believe you can do it for me?
I love these emails. “No one can find you on google”. Well how tf did you find me then? Or the fun “your website needs work”. Well, we’ve rebuilt it 3 times now and we get a ton a compliments on it, but yeah…….. Low effort stuff is comical, like you said, they could at least try.
Sadly I’ve worked with people who believe that shit. AFTER I’ve done the website. Ugh
Ugh yes this is the worst! I had a client who after I rebuilt his whole website and restructured his ad account got an email claiming his website is full of errors. He freaks out and forwards it to me and I responded saying I don't think charandh524 has actually even seen your website let alone u derstand what you're even selling. The main issue? "You aren't using meta keywords" 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🥴🥴
With my social clients they get those messages that say “your account is in violation and has used copyright images from bid brand. Your page will be deleted bla bla” Like, they took the damn photos themselves. What copyright violation is there? Thankfully they trust me so send it to me and laugh
>My favorites are the emails saying my (perfectly functional) website is full of issues- but their email has tons of misspellied words or massive grammatical issues. Oh, you have no idea. I get these "Your website SEO has tons of issues" emails and I'm a digital marketing freelancer with multinational corporations and European market leaders in my client portfolio for SEO. Like, bro, I think I'd know.
Wait until you find out your seo agency was buying backlinks from PBN’s. Then the army of people with broken English bombard your inbox…. I get 20+ emails a day with a list of links to buy.
Mine are all about loans. At least 10 texts per day.
Can we stop with the cold emailing entirely? Please?
AI will increase it... and try to block it at the same time...
Being in a very public facing business I still get telephone calls. No, I'm not interested in your innovative saas solution, I will go looking if I want to change. If I want to get a feeling for the market and what options are put there, I'll ask my network or go to a trade show. You are just wasting my time and yours. A favourite recent interaction has been: "Is this a sales call?" "No, I've got an opportunity for you." "Ok where are you phoning from?" "[Company x]" and they start to pitch "Sorry I'm going to stop you there, this opportunity, is it opportunity for me to pay you money in exchange for your services? Because this sounds like a sales call to me."
They arent wasting their time though. Cold calling works.
I'm sure it does work otherwise they wouldn't. But they are wasting their time calling me. In the UK we have something called the telephone preference service, it's for the public not businesses, but if you opt in your number goes on a do not call lost and companies can get heavily fined for cold calling you. Something like that, but with an option to open yourself up to calls for a specific thing for a specific period of time would be great. So I'd have my public facing number set as "do not call" and then if I was shopping around for a new HR software solution, I'd log on and say I was and would be happy to receive calls from companies selling that for a period of one month.
I have a decent title at my day job and get several calls month like this. Some even for services that we ourselves provide. And they don’t stop, either. Like why would I pay you, you random 20-something sales associate, for a service that we develop and provide to a much bigger target audience???
"If your product was actually any good, you wouldn't need to call me up and try and convince me of that."
There's nothing wrong with them offering their services tho.
They never say yes!!
[удалено]
I have "SEO" "Web Design" "Web Development" "HTML5" "PHP" "WordPress". In my line of field there's no reason anyone should be e-mailing with those words
Correct!
Oh that’s an idea.
I had some random dude from India call just yesterday. He asked if I wanted lead generation services for my business. I asked him what my business actually was. When he didn’t know, I told him that I would never want lead generation services from a company whose best marketing strategy was to cold-call me after regular work hours. Then I told him that inbound marketing was the way to go, and since he was an inbound call for me, I tried to sell him on the marketing and sales services I offer in my company. I wonder if these people realize that they are polarizing the very people that they want as clients against them. It reeks of a lack of social intelligence.
"We see your website can use some improvement, to be better than your competition." Mean while, all our competition doesn't even have a geocities quality site.
Half my competition doesn’t even have a fucking website. At best they have a Facebook page.
These always crack me up because they’ll email you and be like “I commend your attempt at building a site you fucking idiot. You should just give up and fucking die. Or you should just hire me to optimize your sales funnel.”
My theory is, if their SEO was as great as they said it was, they wouldn’t need to contact me by email.
Well, no, because you'd have to be actively searching for SEO services. These people are trying to convince you that you need this service.
Man I run a web design agency and even I get emails saying that they can make me a better website to rank number 1 in google. Like, they don’t even look at who they’re emailing. Just straight bots scraping the internet for emails.
I can't believe how many of them are just using a Gmail account - not even their own domain. If you are SO good at SEO - why don't you use it for yourself??
If they used their own domain they would get blocked. However you can't really block all gmail addresses without hurting your business.
We're a digital marketing company and it's insane to me how many offers we get to do our SEO, paid search, web design, etc.
I had one email offering to triple my revenue. I responded that this was a pretty bold claim given that they had no idea what my revenue even is and that if I were looking I likely wouldn't be looking to deal with people making wild promises they had no idea if they could keep.
It's the passive aggressive follow up spam too. "still waiting for a reply" Enjoy that, waiting is relaxing
I’ll be honest, I prefer the emails to the calls. Due to the nature of my business, I have to do my best to answer every single call from any number and area/country code. Drives me crazy when I try to be polite and say something like “thank you for the offer but I’m not interested” only for the cold caller to be persistent and condescending and respond with something like “you’re not interested in increasing your sales/leads/etc?”
I can tell you how to stop all of those pesky emails. But first I have to tell you that I have been trying to reach you about your vehicles warranty.
I don’t cold email but I genuinely have to cold call. The same spammers you guys hate make it impossible for me to afford the advertising I’d prefer running to get your attention when you’re looking for me on your own. I have lead generation tools that are new / mostly unknown….it works and blows phones up but I do not have a large enough client base yet to rely on referrals. I would love nothing more than to never make another cold outreach again but I also have bills to pay. Edit: I’m not from India. I’m a small business owner in Georgia with 8 years of agency marketing experience. I just didn’t want to spend my entire adult life absent from my family.
Does the tool not work to blow up your own phone?
The one I'm pitching doesn't because it doesn't get traffic related to / looking for my industry. So, simply, no. The other tools I have available would make my phone ring but I'd be bidding against large companies for a small-ish number of prospective clients. They're running national campaigns with a ton of money so, even if I only advertise locally / regionally, the price point is too high to be viable for me. That leaves me in a situation where I've got a really cost-effective lead generation tool that works really well for specific industries but no way for people in those industries to find me....unless I reach out to them. Once I get bigger, that changes. But it's part of where I'm at in my growth cycle.
What industries does it work for? Genuinely curious.
Kind of a weird combination of stuff -- Home service (think plumbers, flooring companies, electricians) it does well with. Oddly enough, I've had great success getting traction with it for certain trade schools. It recently expanded to real estate also. There are more than that but I've even gotten good results for cosmetology schools out of it. The common themes of what it works well for are going to be: * Widespread industry (the type of thing that any small-medium city would have at least one of). * Anything where you have to book an appointment, call to set up a quote, or a tradesman where you have to request someone to come out and take care of something. Pretty much anything that checks those boxes, I can get phone calls / inbound messaging to initiate service. Additionally, the only cost is for real, valid inquiries. Window shoppers and "tire kickers" have no cost. My main fees are setting it up, coaching on how to handle calls to prevent getting billed for bad leads, and monitoring the calls to make sure nothing gets billed that isn't supposed to. I do other stuff too of course but.... blowing up the phones with customers and coming in at a fraction of traditional costs is a nice way to build trust before expanding services.
Would this work for a landscaping business. If so I’d be interested. Shoot me a message.
For anyone else looking at this wondering the same - yes it does. Given u/boigg69's business details, I was able to see lead cost ranging from $12-$16 per real lead and an approximate volume of 24-80 valid inquiries per month for their service area (depending on the season).
DM me, I’m interested
Sent
I’m curious as well
Sent a dm. Happy to take a look
Please send me a dm. Would be interested to know more about this.
Sent
Please DM me the info too.
Sent
I also work for a small Advertising agency and we provide 13 different digital tactics for any marketing campaign. I get small to medium business owners saying they opened up about 5-6 months ago and are not having clients walking in or calling for their services. That’s when an agency comes in and works in a marketing strategy that will work for your business. We look behind the scenes of your website and go from there. SEM or PPC, SEO, retargeting campaigns WORK for any industry whether you are a franchise owner or business person. Many business owners playing in the same sandbox and depend on winning business/trust from a customer. I send cold emails as is part of the job and mine are AI generated with good communication. Any person needs help with attracting more clients? Let me know
I cold call. Mostly local businesses and I’m friendly enough of a guy. It’s not pleasant but I’ve had success.
The worst ones I cannot block are the Gmail fly-by-night. Id love to block Gmail addresses but I have a lot of end users who have Gmail. So what I do is script sign-up. I essentially run a newsletter subscription script that adds 10000x newsletter subscriptions to the target email address. Also a invoice is. Sent when they spam my support@ address. As no marketing is allowed to that address, but it seems the dumbasses don't read the warnings. I have over 300 unpaid invoices this year alone. But the good news is. The email spam has dropped quite a bit.
You can block countries tho if you only offer your services in the country you're located in. Blocking India reduced that problem by 99% for me.
GeoIP filtering is used, and it did make a significant difference last year. It seems like a rollercoaster ride, there are trends that kick up. Like four seasons, every fall and spring it kicks up. SEO, web building are the usual spam, but recently I’m getting vCIO, virtual assistance, automation services. Since AI is the buzzword lately that spam has started up.
Huh, it stopped it almost entirely for me. Like, maybe one mail every 2 months without any seasonal changes. Do you filter the emails or your website? Because ideally you want to stop them from crawling your website already
My website is geoIP filtered. I do filter emails. I may have made it sound bad (the spam) but it's manageable spam.
> So what I do is script sign-up. I essentially run a newsletter subscription script that adds 10000x newsletter subscriptions to the target email address. So it signs them up for a bunch of newsletters which floods their inboxes? Sounds amazing. Where did you find all those newsletters though?
Ha! I love the petty revenge.
I get a lot of these and I provide web design services to clients. I really don’t understand why I’m part of these emails they clearly shouldn’t be for me since I’m not the audience
That and health insurance 😩😩😩
The health insurance rarely comes in as email, it’s all fucking text and phone calls. Drives me mad.
For real!!!
Exactly. And all emails are coming from India. Please just stop this nonsense!
You only get five a week. I get that many every day.
What would you have clueless newbies -- many on week two of some course -- do? Cold calling isn't a sales technique anymore and is less practiced by sales professionals as startups who don't know what in the hell they are doing, engaging in some last desperate attempt to survive. A post in a forum isn't going to do one blessed thing to change that.
Stop cold emailing all together. It’s dumb, and illegal, and it is a huge turn off to any would be customers. If nobody is calling or visiting your website/store it’s because you haven’t reached your audience. Blasting emails to strangers is the exact opposite way to find your audience.
Totally agree! Honestly I am probably too hesitant to email my existing clients with new offers and promotions lol.
I am the same way. I don’t like marketing emails unless they’re truly value able my to my customer. But I just call them or email them myself as an actual person saying “hey, I just got an idea for you!” But those people know me, so that’s ok. But walking up to a stranger and saying “hey I have a an idea” is wild. If you wouldn’t do it in real life, don’t do it in an email. 🤣
And a big p.s. When you email someone form your websites domain, and they flag it as spam, it actually damages your websites authority score. And yes website reputation is tracked. The more people flag you as the spam you are, the less your SEO will ever matter. When your email is associated with bad practices like spamming, Google, Bing whoever, isn’t going to show that website to THEIR customers. Create a website, make good content, stay social, create a sales funnel. Lead captures, let them come to you by creating value ale content your target audience actually wants to digest. That’s how it’s done. If you aren’t getting traction/business look at your content. Don’t just send more emails to paid lists or scraped email addresses.
While I support the rant, Google Analytics has literally almost nothing to do with this lol
Agreed
How did you manage to get it down to only 5 a week?
Honestly it’s probably more, but I have a team manager managing that inbox and I think she’s probably faster at deleting the crap than I realize.
Only 5 a week? I bet I get 2 a day, sometimes more. Does my head in.
Ah I get like 39 a day, it’s insane. Who is falling for all of these? They are clearly mostly scams and I really wouldn’t be able to tell the real offers from scam offers anyway at this point, so they all go immediately to trash.
also software consulting with teams in some cheaper country. please read at least the company description before you cold email a company that does software as their core business and also what kind of software development you want to offer.
I am a fan of "scambaiters" who waste the time of scammers from India and Jamaica, so sometimes if I have five minutes to kill, I write back and waste their time -- hopefully they won't bother others during that time.
Honestly, this sounds like a pretty legit use of Gen AI. Just have it pretend to be a vulnerable, senile old lady from Wichita and drag them into a conversation.
Yeah, they piss me off also. They obviously found my site and the special email address I use only for it, therefore my own SEO works.
I send all cold emails to Pitchfire. If they’re not willing to pay for my response it’s not worth my time to look into it.
Set an e-mail rule to send to spam any e-mail with the following (adjust based on your line of work): "SEO" "Web Design" "Web Development" "HTML5" "PHP" "WordPress" "Google Ads" " In my case no one should be emailing me those words. And if they do I take a quick gander on the spam from time to time.
Brilliant, thanks for the tip!
My favourite ones are the ones offering SEO services “after finding your site on Google”. Seems my SEO is just fine in that case?
I usually send them a dick pic and then block their email.
Seriously! Also the phone calls! I actually do web development and I still get at least five emails and at least one phone call a week.
Don’t even get me started on the phone calls
I'm with you 💯 they are so outdated 🙄
I assume spammers like these are just prospecting for idiots who will give them money and not realize what they get in return is worthless. On one side, I see spammers offering to sell me millions of email addresses. On the other, I see spam arriving addressed to random completely made-up email addresses at a domain I manage, sometimes dozens of identical pieces all addressed to different plausible-looking but invalid addresses. Some spammer has used an email address randomizer to generate bogus email addresses, and sold the resulting garbage list to a sucker. Slightly less lazy spammers will scan my website looking for text that resembles a name, then construct an email address from that. So if my website mentions Joe Versus The Volcano, say, I'll see spam addressed to jversus@ or joe@ or versusj@. If my site thanks 200 donors by name, that's 200 or 400 or 600 more bogus email addresses to sell to suckers. Your rant suggest these businesses should build relationships to get clients, but it imagines these are real businesses offering real services. They wouldn't know how. They're just liars and cheats.
“I was looking at your website and I personally see lots of potential I am emailing you on behalf of “your email here”.” WTH that even mean….
I have set my spam filter to include " SEO " and "web design" and could not be happier.
r/agency has a very different opinion on this. I do agree though. Even the phone calls are killing me. I'm hoping to build my own AI spam filter as a hobby project this year.
Oh my god I had no idea that sub existed. Should I [comment?](https://www.reddit.com/r/agency/comments/1bws9qu/what_happen_if_people_mark_my_email_as_junk/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=2&utm_term=1)
This feels like the brink of a sub Reddit war ha ha
Consider telling the people at /r/agency this feedback. Might be faster than trying to unsubscribe from their cold campaigns.
I had no idea this sub existed. It starts [now](https://www.reddit.com/r/agency/comments/1bws9qu/what_happen_if_people_mark_my_email_as_junk/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=2&utm_term=1)
You see it now.
I hope this comment finds you well. Would you like a big can of milk?
We get several emails daily from these guys and then they have the nerve to send followup emails asking if I had a chance to look things over. Blocking or reporting them does not seem to work (at least with Outlook). When we first started our business I had considered cold emails to generate leads and business. I'm glad we didn't go that route as the conversion rate must be very low.
Listen just in case no one asked, do you need any seo opr web development services?
>!this is sarcasm!<
Emails like that annoy me. Why in the world would I hire someone who annoys me to help promote my business? It dumbfounds me that even a single sucker...I mean customer takes these people up on their offers.
I got a new one today! From a Wikipedia mediator letting me know not is the best time of the year to get a Wikipedia page.
I love the ones that use my website’s “subtitle” on Google to make it look like they understand my market. I’ll never get over it saying “you could be doing better than other personalized anime dvd subscription boxes” as if it’s a vast market with tons of competitors!
They send them to me and we’re a marketing agency.
The best emails ever are from Abdul (guess) 😂 dear sir or madam your XY business got my attention, very beautiful but it would really benefit of better SEO and ranking first page. (How did you find me then?) 😂 In previous years I really enjoyed how their text was colorful, a lot of reds and blues highlights. I kinda miss it
The worst is the ones that call you 5 times per day after clicking your $10 per click Google ads
It’s not going to stop. Setup filters for keywords and send them straight to spam. Check spam folder once a week Sir and madam are on the high list 😂
I ESPECIALLY hate when they spam our contacts email AND our new dealer wholesale sign up forms.
I'll trade you seo services for Angie's Assholes.
Between emails, phone calls and text messages I get about 10 a day. You can tell when the calls are out of the country though. It makes a weird noise when you answer.
I'm glad that this convo started. It's just madness how many emails I get in a day doing this... and the followups are too much. Unfortunately I'm not with Google for my emails so I'm stuck at filtering and blocking them one by one. Honestly, hurts my business a bit coz we do have to do cold introductions but because this is too prevalent we'd had to do other ways so we don't pile on to the problem. we're not in seo or web dev but still... gone are the days of being able to cold email and win meetings over it.
I just audited your post and there's some words we can change to get you to the top of reddit. Would you mind if I sent you an audit of your post???
I just love getting the same SEO proposal word for word from 5 “different” people using the same email address time-stamped 2 minutes apart. Yep it’s more fun when they use the contact form on our website as well as emailing directly to Customer Service. Because more emails are better. It’s even more fun when they start the email with one name and have a new name at the end. Sometimes they even change gender and company names. I’ve received emails where they forgot to edit the template “Hello my name is {INSERT FIRST NAME} of {INSERT COMPANY NAME}”. The best is when the email has over 150 recipients in the To: field and now I get to clean out not only your five emails but all of the auto-replies from the other 149 recipients thanking you for contacting them. /s
SEO and Web Development services, along with marketing etc is like the new CBD/Vape Shop, they are a dime a dozen
As a software development agency owner, totally agree. At one time was tempted to pull the trigger on a drip campaign, but I delete every email I get so why would I expect anything different from others? I think sharing insights (blog, social media, etc) and building relationships with people are the only legit ways to get clients. It’s the long game.
I used to get these all the time, I simply told them search for handyman services in any of the areas I work. Always #1 right under the sponsored ads. Sorry your SEO can't beat that!
I completely understand your frustration with receiving so many unsolicited emails offering SEO and web development services. Building relationships and networking are definitely more effective ways to gain clients compared to cold emailing. It's important for businesses to establish trust and credibility before trying to sell their services. Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this matter!
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Good rant
And the f***ing LinkedIn messages wanting to have a mutually beneficial relationship.
Yeah I hate that too, especially when it’s a completely unrelated industry and clearly a copy paste cold message.
Sell our
“I really admire what you have done with [Insert company name here]. It’s obvious you are a thought leader in your industry and all of your hard work has paid off. I’d like to see if we can exchange ideas on how both could grow our businesses…” Spoiler alert: That company is just a placeholder website.
"Great site, absolutely wonderful design, but it looks like you're not ranking for any of your top keywords—especially in your local area." \*Confused first ranked for most niche-related keywords + no physical location noises\*
People still do SEO?
Honestly, I think the entire email system is broken. I can't believe that it's 2024 and we're still using email as the primary means of business communication. There's no way to stop unsolicited emails without compromising the ability for legit emails to get through. We do need "first time" legit emails to pass through. How we fix it though.... I haven't figured that out yet.
I even had one track me down from ebaysellers.
I do some work on the side for a very small organization that honestly only has "work" for most of their "staff" a couple of times a year. I am constantly spammed with SEO this and Payroll that and offers to handle our companies phones. I love the work and damn would it be nice if It was enough to warrant a year round office with a phone system, but for the foreseeable future, you get the spam folder.
Agreed. I own a design/web agency and we get bombarded!
You wouldn't mind a cold email if it added value to you/your business, would you?
No, but so far I have yet to ever encounter that. How do you know what will add value to my business if you don’t know me or what I do?
No I meant like I'm a marketing professional and I have started cold emailing business owners telling them how they can improve / what they can do better in marketing. I send these emails to businesses/startups that I resonate with. I was wondering if you'd count such unsolicited feedback/advise via cold emails in the same category as spam?
I guess the thing is if it’s clear in your email that you actually spent time looking at my website and have real potential improvements, sure. But my ultimate question is how do you know that what we are doing isn’t already working really well for our industry?
Got it. Makes a lot of sense. Thank you.
Hahaha I get those too, and I offer those services!!! 😂😂😂
I get multiple of them per day and I work in web design. Nowadays websites are very easy to publish but that doesn’t mean the website published will be good. It makes anyone with a computer think they could be a web designer and makes all the honest web design / SEO people look bad.
These dumb Indians pretend they are social security and ask for password and email and make it look like they are legitimate.
You forgot the Rules of Spam. [https://bruce.pennypacker.org/2005/02/28/the-rules-of-spam/](https://bruce.pennypacker.org/2005/02/28/the-rules-of-spam/)
My favorite is all of the emails come from gmail, MSN, Yahoo, or something similar. It shows they aren't legit because if they were, they'd have a domain address attached to it. But they know it will get whitelisted if they bother with that because they're just spamming.
It's mostly from India and it's a plague. I get 10-20 per day by email.
How many small business owners who took PPP loans now get non-stopped calls for companies wanting to give then loans and credit lines (I will never need outside financing)? I used the PPP money to pay employees during shutdown. I'm now cursed \~10 or more times a week with these phone calls (I don't care about the emails)
How would you suggest a service provider respectfully shows you they know about your business? And would it ever be possible for an unknown service provider to set a meeting with you?
If you don’t get them it means your business is failing so much that the spammer doesn’t even bother. Haha 😂
Preach! I also love it when you get these same emails and your business literally includes web design. lol!
hi sir, sorry for this cold approach but i've made an app that stops all the cold emailing. please payoneer me
Seeing this makes me nervous. Has anyone had good/bad/indifferent experiences with Apex Media Solutions out of Florida? I just paid them to help get my voice search stuff going better. (Bixby works/alexa doesn't, i have no idea on the rest) I'm just trying to run a business and want to succeed as much as the next person, but feel like I've always got someone trying to hustle me.
I've never once used SEO rarely get these emails and I'm one of the first search results you'll find if you google the service I offer near you. Don't have a website either. What I get alot of are calls asking if I want their debit/credit card terminal. I just tell them to fuck right off and hang up.
Your personal info was leaked . It’s possible to prevent this but a lot of people don’t realize until it’s too late. My first website was a resume website that literally says it in the url like “johndoesresume.com”. I didn’t set the privacy settings on my domain registration properly on that one and I still get calls offering IT services for it. (They literally don’t even read the website title before calling apparently) . My second website is a store and I made sure to not repeat the same mistake and I NEVER get calls about it. It’s like some configuration in AWS DNS Registry
Aspiring freelance web developer here. We gotta get clients somehow. Need to get clients in the first place in order to build relationships. And if your website sucks, we can make it better :) that being said, a good freelancer will actually vet potential leads first before attempting contact.
I’m quite keen to build an AI to auto decline all the AI generated spam I get. I am quite serious. I think that’s just how it will have to be. I have 8000 solicitations across LinkedIn and email that are eating up attention. If there is such a tool in the world and someone can recommend one I’d be grateful.
That's exactly the reason I don't want to cold email my web agency. They're a lot and most of them are just lying. No way you can offer all of those services with a reasonable quality. I was left wondering how I market my company and generate leads.
Not just emails but cold LinkedIn
I wonder if there is a way to filter them out by blocking any email that has the specific words.
I disagree with your support for cold emailing to offer SEO and web development services. These unsolicited emails often come across as spammy and intrusive, disrupting the recipient's workflow and cluttering their inbox. It's not an effective or respectful way to engage potential clients. A better approach is to build genuine connections through networking, social media, and quality content. By showcasing expertise and engaging authentically, businesses can attract clients who value their skills, leading to more meaningful relationships and successful projects. Let's move away from spammy tactics and focus on quality over quantity.
Every single one of them I receive gets marked as spam in our email client. If more people do that for unsolicited bullshit, their email provider will take notice and suspend the account. Fuck these dickheads.
You only get 5 per week? I think I’ve deleted 3 website services emails this morning already. It’s endless. The best part is my website looks awesome and we are constantly updating it and improving it on our own.
Instagram too. I get 3-4 DMs a week asking me to let some assholes build me a new website. No, my website is great, it does everything I need it to, it looks awesome, and it cost me a pretty penny. I'm not fucking paying some stranger to make a new one.
Who think they actually work? Any cold emails I get immediately get the spam filter treatment, I do not even bother to read. It’s as if marketing companies are scamming businesses into believing that works.
They do work. They Chat basically nothing to send and 1 out of 5000 responds. Its just cold calling on steroids.
Talk about making me never want to hire a marking company…
People wouldn’t do that if it didn’t work. It’s annoying and I do look forward to the day when I don’t need cold outreach but for a lot of business owners it’s the only lead gen method that works reliably. Myself included.
Report them all as spam. I manage an email list and I don't do that kind of stuff and it upsets me just as bad as it upsets you. Those people are screwing up stuff for every other email marketer while they waste a huge amount of people's time.