Weekend Links: Spamming for Good

This weekend’s featured article, Spamming for Good comes from the Sept 1st issue of Fast Company.

The article is about Mani Sivasubramanian, a Chennai-based pediatric heart surgeon who donates up to 50% of his profits from his spam email business to the Children’s Heart Foundation, which he founded himself in 2003.

Last year, he took home about $25,000 from his “email marketing” and donated about $10,000 to his foundation. This money helped fund 13 surgeries.

As a victim of spam, it was hard for me to get past the “email marketing”, even though a portion of the revenues go to save children’s lives. However, what is remarkable is that the marketing response rates increases by 4-6 times when the emails stipulate that the proceeds go to the foundation.

For most of his email pitches, Sivasubramanian gets a response of %5 to 10%. But when offers stipulate that proceeds go to the foundation, his response jumps to between 30% and 40%.

That increase in performance gives me a better feeling about the whole thing– when 30% to 40% of the people are responding to the offers, it sounds useful or relevant (even if its just for the charity aspect).

Subscription is required to read the article now, so you can either pick up the September issue at your local newstand or wait until Fast Company makes it publicly available in a few weeks.

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