I was joking with some friends at work that what we're doing here is "making the world a better place, one email at a time." The truth is that creating and deploying email marketing campaigns for huge brand name companies is hard work. Not only that, but in most people's minds email marketing is synonymous with spam. So telling friends and family what you do for a living always has to include an ironic disclaimer that "we hate SPAM as much as you do".
Don't believe me? I don't blame you. I get SPAMMED a thousand times a day and if a commercial emailer told me they were not spamming, I'd be skeptical...if I didn't know better. It turns out, however, that in fact I work for a company that sends targeted permission based electronic messages on behalf of my clients to their own customers. Why? Because my clients need experts and technology that can do the job. And as I said, it's a hard job to do.
How can I make my living on commercial email and still hate spam? Spam makes it a lot harder for my clients to communicate with their customers. Spam clutters up my inbox too. And, spam is the reason my chosen profession is so commonly misunderstood.
I'll try to explain. If you're like me, you have chosen to receive email from some companies you do business with. Mine include a professional sports team, a cigar store and my alma mater. With all the personal and job related email I receive daily, there are only a handful of companies I've done business with that I've given permission to email me. The rest get trashed. My clients are businesses that have customers who have given their permission to receive email. Marketers call this relationship or current customer email marketing.
By contrast, most of what we would call spam is prospect email marketing. Prospect email marketing consists of messages sent from companies to consumers without a pre-existing business relationship. Of course, it depends on what your definition of spam is, but most people I believe would agree that commercial email sent without explicit permission is spam. When a business "rents" a list of email addresses and pays for their offer to be sent to them they are prospecting for new customers - and more often than not, spamming them.
Spamming is easy and cheap. Unsolicited and untargeted messages are sent either by the business using some off the shelf software or by professional spammers. A lot of it bounces or goes undelivered. Even less of it reaches an inbox. Much less of it is opened. Much less than 1% of that get clicked on, and much less than 1% of the clicks result in some action. Still, because it is so cheap to send email this way it often pays off. Why do you think spam still thrives?
Once again by contrast, my clients use the company I work for because we are experts in doing email marketing that is far more difficult, compliant and in accordance with all the best practices in the marketing industry. The messages are targeted to my client's customers based on their preferences and consumer behavior. The email creative is tested to make sure it appears correctly in outlook, gmail or anything in between. The message contains a prominent link that allows the recipient to opt-out instantly. Our system is designed never to send a message to that address again. Our company maintains good relationships with all the Internet service providers who we send email to. We constantly run tests for our clients to determine what strategies are most effective. We provide our clients detailed reporting and analysis of all their campaigns.
I am proud to work with a dedicated team of expert, lawful and ethical email marketers.
