Sloppy Marketing Weakens Email Effectiveness
Friday, January 13, 2012 at 4:25PM In just a few short years, email revolutionized marketing. Yet email abuse, spam and sloppy email marketing practices have reduced its effectiveness.
As a result, I routinely pass over email as a viable acquisition channel. 
Only double opt-in email sent to customers offers sufficient revenue to warrant attention. There are exceptions, as always. But unsolicited mass delivered emails to prospects often work to the detriment of the advertiser's reputation and bottom line.
As Reggie Brady writes (a recognized authority on the email channel) in her recent Target marketing article entitled "E-commerce Link : Don’t Tarnish Your Reputation!".
"Email deliverability is still a major challenge for marketers… The newest wrinkle is that user behavior can affect deliverability—particularly for consumer mailers.
Many ISPs now calculate a mailer's reputation based on how many email messages are opened and/or clicked. If too many recipients do not open or click, your email may be routed to a bulk folder even if you are white-listed. Conversely, even if you've had higher spam complaints, your email may be delivered to the primary inbox if your opens or clicks are strong".
The government, ISPs and spam filter developers are all working to reverse the tide. But spam and spammer ingenuity continue to grow. In this environment, emailers struggle to keep their noses above the water line.
Other than spammers, the worst offenders are the companies that send their emails indiscriminately or too frequently. Their sloppiness reduces the email channel's potential for all of us.
The best email strategy is the same strategy for all marketing efforts. Marketers should carefully consider the impact of their marketing decisions on the customer first. If they do so, customers will reward them with repeat sales and loyalty.
Reader Comments (3)
Great article. Email has definitely suffered as an acquisition channel due to abuse, spam and shoddy marketing practices. I find it is still a very effective channel to use as part of a CRM programme to strengthen relationships with and grow business from existing customers.
As a cheap and cheerful retention and loyalty tool, email is great. But I agree it is broken.. your comments about tougher spam filters are interesting. I think hotmail is one of the weakest speaking from personal experience. However my gmail accounts are much more secure. Personal habits show I rarely glance at my hotmail emails but read the majority of my gmail.
I switched DNS services to get better up front spam filtering to stop spam from reaching my email client. That definitely helped. And years ago, I purchased an additional spam filter for my business computers. In spite of these two filtration systems, about 10-20% of my emails are spam.
The spam wars continue taking down much of the marketing punch once offered by email. Nevertheless, we still rely heavily on email for application fulfillment packages and other customer requests for email transactions.
The real victim here is customer acquisition email campaigning.