Wandering Thoughts archives

Why 'email marketing' winds up as spam

The problem with email marketing, why in practice it turns into spam, is what I will call 'address list creep'.

The cleanest list of addresses to send your marketing email to is people who specifically requested that they receive them. But even at the best of times, this is not quite the same as 'people who have specifically subscribed themselves to a mailing list that you run', and this difference creates a strong pressure to let people in your organization add addresses to the mailing list.

This might work in theory, but in practice marketing and sales are populated by people who are at least optimists (and sometimes worse). So your careful list of people who requested email broadens to include people who wanted it without specifically requesting it, and then broadens to include people who the marketing department are sure want it, and then broadens even further. And then you are spamming people, because even with the best of intentions your organization went one optimist too far.

(For all of the obvious reasons, the situation gets worse if your marketing and sales people have quotas or other incentives to generate 'leads' and do not have the quality of those leads checked rigorously.)

A similar thing happens to addresses that you gather in these carefully maintained mailing lists. Sooner or later someone in marketing is going to win an argument about how, if people on your list signed up to hear about A, they clearly also want to hear about B. And then you are spamming people again, and in a way that is especially damaging (because you have not merely spammed people, you have betrayed their trust that you would not spam them).

(None of this is original to me, but I feel like writing it down.)

'Email marketing' versus outright email spam

While I think that the end effects are the same, I think that there is a conceptual difference between what gets called 'email marketing' and outright email spam, and that this difference influences how the people who originate 'email marketing' think about it.

To put it one way, what I call 'email marketing' at least attempts to be the logical extension of physical mail marketing; you gather the addresses of your customers, of business cards dropped into your giveaway draws at tradeshows, of people who have sent you sales inquiries or requests for literature, 'qualified leads', and so on, and then pelt them with stuff. In the old world you did it with physical mail, and in the new electronic world you do it with email, because it is at least convenient for marketers to consider email the equivalent of paper email rather than a phone call.

(There are some marketing departments that would cold-call valuable customer prospects, but not many of them, and I don't think that they last long. People hate cold calls, and alienating good potential customers is not good business.)

This contrasts with email spammers, who make basically no attempt to restrict who they spam; they'll happily spray random or at best semi-random email addresses, for a collection of reasons.

People who are engaged in genuine email marketing (as opposed to using it as a cover for spam) care both about it going to the right people and it being well received, just as they would care for a paper mail campaign. You can thus at least theoretically influence their actions by pointing out where they fail on both issues. People who are spamming don't really care about either issue, they just care that the response rate is high enough to give them an economic return (and often the answer to that is to spam more addresses).