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BT and Virgin Media – The Excess Marketing Letter SPAM Kings

Monday, Oct 12th, 2015 (1:23 am) - Score 1,267

Mirror mirror on the wall, which of the biggest broadband ISPs sends the most marketing junk of them all? The latest survey of 1,139 ISPreview.co.uk readers has revealed that nearly all receive ISP marketing mail through their letter boxes at home, but some suffer significantly more junk than others.

The survey found that 85.2% of respondents have received marketing mail (posted letters) from a broadband ISP, other than their own provider, during the past three months. In terms of quantity, some 45.6% have received 2 to 3 items of ISP related marketing mail through their letterbox in the past month alone, while 14.1% saw 4-6 items and 8.2% claim to be receiving 7 items or more.

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Excessive advertising spam is perhaps symptomatic of the UK’s aggressively competitive broadband market, with ISPs being so keen to promote themselves that they’ll sometimes even spam home owners with near identical promotions once or even twice a week, which soon becomes annoying.

In other situations the service being promoted may not even be available to your location, but that doesn’t seem to stop the marketing departments. Overall the two worst offenders in all this appear to be Virgin Media and BT, at least according to more than half of our survey respondents.

Have you received marketing mail (posted letters) from a broadband ISP, other than your own, in the past three months?
Yes – 85.2%
No – 14.7%

On average, how much marketing mail do ISPs put through your letter box per month?
2-3 Items – 45.6%
1 Item – 22.9%
4-6 Items – 14.1%
None – 9%
7 Items+ – 8.2%

In your opinion, which of these ISPs sends you the most junk / spam in the post?
Virgin Media – 29.3%
BT – 28%
TalkTalk – 23.2%
Sky Broadband – 13.7%
Other – 4.9%
EE – 0.7%

The good news is that you can sometimes put a stop to this annoyance by contacting the provider concerned and asking them to quit sending you rubbish, although the fact that consumers have to spend their own time to do this is a frustration in itself and in any case it doesn’t always work. Marketing departments seem to have a short memory for the word STOP!

Royal Mail also offers a programme to stop some of the SPAM, although this generally only applies to leaflets and un-addressed mail (here). So here are some other things that you could try.

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ISPreview.co.uk’s Top Tips for Dealing with ISP Marketing Junk

1. Convert the unwanted promotions into paper-mache, such as to recreate unpopular political figures (there are many to choose from) in time for the 5th November celebrations.

2. Put it all into the recycle bin and feel happy, safe in the knowledge that it will be recycled into yet more promotions and put right back through your letter box again next week.

3. Redirect the mail back to the sending ISP, ideally as part of a persistent local community effort, until they get the message to stop and or suffocate under the sheer weight of all that unwanted paper.

4. Make paper aircraft and throw them towards a fellow family member or friend, thus passing the responsibility for dealing with said waste onto another unwitting human. You may need to create a lot of planes, but expect retaliatory action.

5. Just allow your [insert pets name here] to continue eating it, as per usual. A bit of toxic ink never did animals any harm, right? Oh.

Meanwhile this month’s new survey asks how much you know about the estimated speed of your broadband ISP connection and whether or not you run regular speedtests to keep track of any changes? Vote Here.

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Mark-Jackson
By Mark Jackson
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and .
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