TravelCare.co.uk text spam with no STOP opt-out
Book your dream holiday today!!
I can’t ever remember signing up for travelcare.co.uk text alerts.
What’s with mobile marketing nowadays? What idiot authorised this text message to be sent WITHOUT AN OPT OUT MESSAGE?
I really thought we’d cracked this nonsense. I thought everyone-and-their-dog understood that you just wind people up when you don’t put a ‘2 unsub reply STOP’ or similar message on the end of the text?
Similarly, it doesn’t say ‘FREE’ at the start.
I don’t have a relationship with travelcare.co.uk. Flogging me rubbish text messages like this is just a wind-up exercise.
Where DID they get my number from, I wonder?
It’s part of the Co-Op Group. I think I used to have a bank account with them. I wonder if I ticked a box? If I did, surely I get the option, somewhere along the line, to unsubscribe? Surely I should be offered some sort of control over this?
Yes, and don’t call me Shirely.
The Co-Op Group isn’t some shitty back-street ‘flog’em holidays’ operation. It’s a big, proper ethical group of companies. At least, I thought it was. The bank certainly is.
So, who owns +447797 800 361 then? That’s the sender ID. At least, whoever sent this message is responsible enough to send an originator ID.
But geez. If I wasn’t so busy, I’d be going through the roof at the Chief Executive of Travelcare.co.uk for allowing his or her people to carry out such shoddy mobile marketing.
Surely this sort of thing is taught at Mobile Marketing 101?
1. First be clear the people on your database are EXPECTNG to hear from you. If not, send them a text reminder and ask them to opt-in.
2. Be clear in your relationship with your database that YOU are paying for the text message to be sent and that it’s not costing them money.
3. Place an opt-out message on the bottom of every text. E.g. ‘To opt out reply STOP’.
Gahhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
Apparently, Co-Op is the UK’s most trusted brand? Says so on the Travelcare.co.uk website here.
Well you could always forward it to 07TEXT 0SPAM (078398 07726) and check http://www.07text0spam.com to see if anyone else has reported it.
Posted by Alex on January 15th, 2007 at 1:00 pm.Forwarded!
Posted by ewan on January 15th, 2007 at 1:03 pm.Ok - here’s my idea and it is one that I’ve had for a long time.
Let’s start making it a requirement for advertisers to provide access to the source of the opt-in. In other words. tell me what box I ticked (or didn’t tick). Show me the terms and conditions where I agreed to this. Explain to me what existing business relationship I have that permits this communication.
List brokering is BIG BUSINESS. If we add an entirely new level of transparency to this business it will cause a few very important things to happen.
Posted by Troy Norcross on January 16th, 2007 at 9:38 am.1) List owners will be a lot more careful about how often - and to whom - they rent their hard earned lists.
2) The resulting increase in value of a transparent list will go up causing the price of list rental to go up resulting in fewer low quality campaigns.
My idea would be to create a safe haven for identities [email, IM and Telephone numbers]. By creating a community within the safe haven. If any external service tried spamming any one user of this service, the rest of the members would be used [willingly] as zombies in a DDOS attack on the spammer.
What if a pillock company decided to use spam and they gave public info on their contact details [Tel]. It is so…………….easy to do a DDOS on them with a VOIP system.
Anyways, OpenID and other ways to create verified identities is good, but what about making a gaming site where WE the gamers target the spammers and the phishers and the rest. Oh what fun…………….. To know that you can ruin a REAL [sic] business as well as improving your score would be so much fun. “Go ahead Punk, make my day, spam me and I will ……. your ass and get 1000 points”.
Yours militantly……………………Loopy
Posted by loopy on January 16th, 2007 at 10:38 am.Hmm, it’s not *completely* wrong as I understand it…
There is at least a reply path so you can tell them to stop annoying you or even ask them a question like ‘where did you get my number’? Chances are you did legitimately tick a box 5 years ago that said send me marketing text messages, or it was hidden in some ts and cs somewhere.
Yes, they messed up, they should have added ‘reply stop to unsubscribe’ or something similar but it’s not the worst crime in the world - at least they’re trying it. My top tips for them:
* Add ‘reply stop to unsubscribe’
* Keep the telephone number as a single number so that most phones pick it up as a phone number
* Make sure you have a wapsite so that folks like us can click thru on the link in the message rather than having to wait until you’re near a pc to get to the website
* Identify the sender in the message (so if you had subscribed to say Mobile Offers Inc then [Mob Offers] should be included in the message - or at least a shortened version of it that would be recognisable to customers)
* Ask someone who knows about these things to check that your campaign is legit, usable and customer friendly.
The much worse crimes are *still* from the dodgy mobile content and ringtone companies sending out wap push messages saying you’ve got something free when actually, you don’t have anything free and it links you to potentially very unsuitable content. Or they’re just touting their dodgy services period. My number seems to be doing the adult content industry rounds at the moment and I’m getting some very dubious links to ‘hot sexy videos right now’! And as you’ll see over at Brumbletext (http://www.grumbletext.co.uk/vt.php?t=333) you’ll see I’m not the only one! Those messages are far more damaging IMHO than a company trying out mobile marketing first time round and making a few mistakes.
Guess it makes sense to ask someone who knows about these things before sending out your messages rather than relying on the salesperson who sold you the data or the sms marketing system in the first place who probably doesn’t have a clue
Posted by Helen Keegan on January 16th, 2007 at 3:52 pm.oh, and there’s no need to add ‘free’ to the message AFAIK. You’re limited enough with 160 characters AND having to include the sender’s name and an optout so do include FREE as well really leaves nothing left and could conflict with the promotion message e.g. a buy one get one free offer. That would be even more confusing.
Of course, if you’re charging customers for something you MUST be very clear about how much you’re going to charge them, how and when.
Posted by Helen Keegan on January 16th, 2007 at 3:54 pm.