How Companies’ fool & misguide you through marketing E-Mailers [Case Study]

I am sure most of you who are reading this article may have come across an unsolicited email that has arrived in your inbox with some unbelievable offers or wins or worst some downloads  etc. Majority of the users are now aware of it (and delete it), but, there are some new unaware internet users who fall for it.

Fortunately, most e-mail platforms do a good job now-a-days to divert such mails to spam avoiding users falling into their traps.

However, there are breed of companies’ and marketers who also use not-so-clean tactics to misguide email users. I just came across one such email today and wanted to show our readers how they easily fool email users.

Today, in my Gmail inbox, I got a mail from “Airtel Live” with subject line “Keep track of missed calls with airtel missed call alerts.”.

Though, I am not a Airtel user, I was quite curious about the mail. Once I opened the email and scrutinized it – It was clear that it was a marketing email not coming from Airtel, but fromyoumint.com, a rewards point company. The email was sent so that I should sign-up for their program.

See the Email Screenshot given below:

You can also see the online version of not-so-genuine ad here. [Update: This link was previously taking me to Youmint website for sign-up… Looks like after this post, the link has been diverted to Airtel Website]

Now, there is a chance that Youmint.com might have partnered with Airtel – even then, this mail misguides the user completely into thinking that this mail has directly come from Airtel. There is absolutely no mention on Youmint.com anywhere in the email.

Now, this is just an example, but marketers use such tactics widely and users have to be careful about clicking on any such emails. These kind of emails don’t only fool the users but also the Email Spam filters.

Even Brands (like Airtel in this case) have to be careful about their name / logo being used for such purposes.