Spam is not a marketing strategy

Unfortunately, this fact doesn’t stop anyone from spamming as part of their marketing outreach. And it’s not just email spam. I get quite a bit of blog spam, most of which is caught by Akismet. Occasionally, though, there’s spam which isn’t caught by the filter and ends up coming to me for approval.
Many of these are explanations of why email marketing is so awesome. Some of them are out and out laugh inducing. One of my favorites, and the inspiration for this post.

email marketing is great specially if you have a large list of email address of potential customers`”-

I mean, I know that spammers just fire up their comment spam engines and don’t bother to actually read the blog or even look at the content. But I still get somewhat offended? peevish? amused? when the blog spammers try and spam their email spam engines and large lists of “opt in” email addresses on my blog.
This, in a nutshell, is the essence of spam. I am going to just mindlessly blast out a message in the hopes that somehow, somewhere, someone will get my message and send me money.
My frustration is that so many legitimate email marketers also send out email in a single ‘batch and blast’ with the hope that a few recipients will make a purchase. These marketers treat recipients as a commodity that exist solely for the marketer to exploit for money. They hate the fact that recipients have a way to complain about email. They complain about ISP standards that are too high and prioritize what recipients want to receive over what marketers want to send.
This isn’t what email is about. I don’t think I’ve made any secret about how much I value email and everything it’s done for me. Email is the original social network and one that, without exaggeration, changed my career path and my life. I want the people who come after me to have as good an experience. I want them to be able to use email for everything they want to do with it: communicate with friends, interact with companies, learn about stuff and share everything they want to in the way they want to.
If you want to be successful, long term, as an email marketer then you need to start listening to what your recipients want and stop thinking mindless blasts are the secrets to success.

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Email is not direct mail

Had an interesting talk with a colleague at a BBQ this weekend. He was at a large ISP and then moved on to do delivery at a large email marketing company. This marketing company was started by a very successful direct (snail mail) marketer. The CEO believed totally in testing and they measured everything. They knew what colors provoked a better response and which fonts were better received by recipients.
But this wasn’t always enough. They had some spotty delivery and my friend was hired to try and solve the delivery problems. He had some luck and did fix a number of things, but there was a deeper issue he couldn’t address: that email is not direct mail. The types of testing done is the type of testing for direct mail. They were so focused on getting the best response to a particular offer they refused to consider tweaking an offer from their “proven ideal” to stop triggering content filters at some large ISPs. So their ideal offers would sometimes end up in the inbox and sometimes in the bulk folder and sometimes just disappear.
With direct mail, the USPS is required by law to deliver mail to the addressee. Not only that there are a lot of barriers put up to prevent (or discourage) recipients to opt-out of receiving direct mail. This isn’t the case in email. Not only is their no requirement for an ISP to deliver email to recipients, there is actually a law that says that recipients must be able to opt-out from receiving future emails.
Direct marketers are used to having a lot of freedom and control over their mail. They can buy and sell address lists and send almost anything they want without having anyone tell them they can’t. That mindset translates badly into the email space where the ISPs and the recipients have a lot of control over their incoming email. It means that senders with the absolute perfect test copy see delivery problems because their perfect copy looks just like something a spammer would do and gets caught in content filters. It means they come into email and try to buy a list and discover that while it may be financially viable, they have to deal with angry upstreams, blocks at recipient ISPs and sometimes a Spamhaus listing.
Email isn’t the same as direct mail and attempting to map direct mail techniques onto email usually doesn’t work.

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More on opt-out for B2B marketing

There is still a bit of discussion going on around the HBR article on how B2B mail should be opt-out not opt in on various delivery blogs. Over on the Blue Sky Factory blog new daddy (congratulations!) DJ writes a post about why he thinks opt-out in any context is a poor marketing decision.
One of his commenters follows up with a long comment about how recipients shouldn’t get angry when they get unsolicited email from a company they have interacted with.

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What Mark Said

Mark Brownlow skewers the arguments from opt-out proponents. A definite must read.

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