Want More Clients? Embrace Spam.

When I say “embrace spam” I don’t mean you should become a spammer. I mean you should open your inbox to spam and let it flow in and welcome it like a cool breeze on a hot summer day. Stop doing the”contact me at josh at mwi dot com” thing. And definitely get rid of the Captcha box on your “contact us” form. Why?

Every Additional Step Costs Conversions

I run a digital marketing agency. I want potential clients to contact us. I want to remove any barrier that could possibly exist to make it as easy as possible for those potential clients to contact us. And then I read that a 2013 study from Stanford University says:

• 3 people will agree on what a Captcha says only 71 percent of the time.
• Visual Captchas take 9.8 seconds to complete, while audio Captchas take 28.4 seconds.
• Half of those using an Audio Captcha will quit.

In other words, the price we would pay to get rid of spam submitted through our online form would be to give up a percentage of our potential clients. Since a single client can mean tens of thousands of dollars per month in profit, that’s a high price to pay for the convenience of not having to deal with spam. Looking at it another way, sifting through spam is the price we pay to make sure we maximize the number of potential clients who contact us.

I publish my email address everywhere. It’s right there out in the open. I display it proudly for every scraper and bot to harvest and put on its spam list. When I use an email form I make it as simple as possible for someone to fill it in and click submit. I don’t include any verification that the person submitting the form is a human being and not a bot.

What does this cost us? Not much. We use G-suite, formerly known as Google Enterprise Apps, aka Gmail, for our corporate email. That means I host mwi.com on G-suite and am able to use the Gmail platform but use my own domain. Gmail does an amazing job at filtering out spam, and while sometimes there are false positives, I’ve created a rule so I don’t lose any emails from prospective clients who use the email form on our website. Those emails are tagged with certain words in the subject line so I can prevent them from going to my spam filter. There’s a slight chance emails that are sent directly without going through the form could get caught in the spam filter, but it’s rare. I’m sure whatever business I may have lost this way is far less than what I would have lost if we had a Captcha box at the end of the email form on our website.