Developing an e-campaign

Email has not died yet. It is still an effective form of communication, even in the age of Facebook and instant messaging. What many businesses don't realize, however, is that email is a marketing tool that can be used to generate business. And I'm not talking about spam, which is rightly vilified, and will eventually be wiped out or at least severely limited.

What I am talking about is using email to target your customers in an intelligent, research-led way. Many businesses still think that email is just a quicker version of snail mail. They are missing out on a highly effective addition to their e marketing arsenal.

Before you can use email as a proper, effective marketing tool, as part of an e-campaign rather than just a shotgun approach, you need to consider a basic concept in marketing...

The cream of the crop

First of all, don't even bother to use email as a marketing tool until you have identified the top 20 percent of your customer base. These are your best customers. The old 80/20 principle, whereby twenty percent of your customers provide you with eighty percent of your profits, means that you should identify your top 20%, and focus your email campaign on them alone. So identify these people.

And then:

• Consider how they became your customers. Was it via referrals, through a trade show, or through networking?
• Decide just what it is that makes those customers profitable. Why are they your top 20% and what lessons can you learn to help you attract more like them?
• What do you need to tell those customers, or what do they need to know to buy your services? What information do they require?
• What is the best way to reach those customers?

When you know who your top 20% are, make a solemn promise to yourself and your business that you are going to treat them like VIPs, and that your e-campaign will recognize them as the bedrock for future growth.

Future articles will focus on what action you must take to cultivate your 20% list effectively, and develop an e-campaign that will drive sales and build your firm's reputation.

Spammers Now Sending PDF files

Foiled by increasingly accurate corporate spam filters, spammers have dumped pictures for PDFs in their bulk e-mailings, according to the latest data from security firms.

Image spam, which at the beginning of the year accounted for nearly 60 percent of all junk e-mail, has plummeted and now accounts for only about 15 percent of spam. Taking its place, the number of junk e-mail messages using an attachment in the Portable Document Format (PDF) has steadily climbed since mid-June, accounting for as much as a third of spam.

"It went from zero to -- when the spammers started experimenting -- fifty-fifty image spam and PDF spam," said Matt Sergeant, senior antispam technologist for e-mail security firm MessageLabs. "Now, its gone to wholesale PDF spam."

The ebb and flow of different types of spam is an indicator of the arms race between spammers and network defenders. Image spam took off in late 2006, primarily as a way to tout penny stocks and manipulate the volatile over-the-counter markets. Yet, other types of spam, advertising products from fraudulent pharmaceuticals to sexual enhancement devices, soon started using embedded images as well. The growth of image spam peaked earlier this year, making up as much as two-thirds of all spam in January.

Companies have adapted to the attack, however, detecting the unwanted images and blocking them, said MessageLabs' Sergeant.

"The volume of image spam was so great that a number of large businesses took to wholesale blocking of e-mails coming in with image attachments," he said.

The better filtering has led spammers to change tactics and experiment with PDF files.

While security firms agreed that PDF files started regularly appearing as spam attachment about mid-June, estimates for the volume of PDF spam varied somewhat between companies. MessageLabs, which filters out virus-laden and spam e-mail messages for its clients, estimated that about 30 percent of all spam now uses PDF files. Security firm McAfee had a more modest estimate that 2.6 percent of all junk e-mail messages carried PDF files. While Symantec, the owner of SecurityFocus, has found the fraction varies between 2 and 7 percent.

"The spammers are doing the old cat-and-mouse game," said Guy Roberts, senior research manager for anti-spam at McAfee. "Vendors have caught up to spammers and detection is pretty good for image spam, so (the spammers) are changing tactics in order to get their message across."

The growth of spam e-mail messages with PDF attachments have also caused the total bandwidth of spam to grow quickly, because PDF files tend to be much larger than the GIF images that the files are replacing.

From a spammers point of view, the strength of PDF is that many companies require that their e-mail systems allow the documents to be passed to the user, said Menashe Eliezer, director of anti-spam research for security firm CommTouch. Because PDFs are ubiquitous in the business world, such attachments are more likely to reach the users, he said.

"Now, they are using professional looking PDFs, and if it doesn't look like spam, that's even better," Eliezer said.

While moving unwanted advertisements from images to PDFs may make it more likely that the message reaches the intended recipient, whether or not that person opens the attachment is another question, said Doug Bowers, senior director of anti-spam engineering for Symantec.

"We are interested in seeing if this is really effective in getting a spam message, not just delivered, but also read," Bowers said.

In the end, if PDF spam cannot deliver more eyeballs to spammers, the trend may end up being a short-lived phase, he said.

Article written by Robert Lemos, SecurityFocus 2007-07-18.

Fraudulent Email

It has come to our attention that a handful of hosting customers recently received a fraudulent email message claiming to be from CWS. The subject line of this message is "Hosting Regular Security Maintenance."

The message includes an attached PHP script named webguard.php with instructions for the hosting customer to place the script on his or her website and run it. Although this file is presented as a security feature, the opposite is in fact true. The script is malicious and is intended to compromise the security of a server on which it runs.

Should you receive an email of this nature, do not under any circumstances upload the script to your website. If you ever receive an email that claims to be from CWS and have any question at all about its authenticity, please contact us at 1-888-426-7793.