== 'Email marketing' versus outright email spam

While I think that the [[end effects are the same EmailMarketingSpam]],
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).