Opposite
The well-deserved bad image of spam is being projected on all shapes of email marketing. I however think professional email marketing and spam are opposites.
Professional email marketing
Professional e-mail marketing is characterized by the pinpoint of the effort. Usually business to business. Prospects are carefully selected and approached with a proposition that is interesting enough to respond to. A positive response of 5% is considered to be the minimum.
Spam
Spam is like throwing a bomb to kill a fly. Usually the object is achieved: The fly is dead. But against what price in terms of damage. Spammers send hundreds of thousands, sometimes even millions of e-mails. The selection is none or very rough. A positive response of 0,0001% is enough.
Databases
Spam exists because there are large e-mail databases available and obtainable. These databases usually contain e-mail addresses without any further information. Sometimes databases contain qualifications of the e-mail address owner, but these qualifications are inaccurate and too general.
If for example you have ever stated to be interested in the development of medicine your e-mail address will end up in a database that is used to sell Viagra or to promote pills for penile enlargement.
Anti-spam
There is a growing resistance against spam. Anti-spam-organisations, legislation en prosecution must put an end to this pest. A good thing, but not enough. As long as it is possible to get an easy buck people will find ways to spam without being caught. In order to win the battle, anti-spammers keep narrowing the definition of spam. Thus making every commercial user of email suspected.
Some definitions of spam use the term unsolicited as a sole criterion. A letter of a dear old (forgotten) aunt is probably received without being asked for, but will still be delivered by the postman and welcomed by the receiver.
Solution
A simple solution is not at hand. Anti-spammers must continue their battle but leave space for decent professional marketers. The real aim of anti-spam should be the trade in e-mail addresses. Legislators must prohibit sale of addresses without the explicit consent of the owner of the address.
Marketers now have to invest a lot of money in deskresearch in order to pinpoint real prospects for their business. Tools should be developed to simplify this. A good example is MailDigger, an e-mail address search engine that generates public, subject related e-mail addresses.
The author
Dick Molleman is a Dutch publicist. Besides his job as a press officer he owns a business that specialises is communication strategies and company styling.
