Should You Spam?: Advice for Uncertain Businesses
Copyright 2003 by Frank Catalano, www.catalanoconsulting.com

E-mail is cheap. Times are tough. Those two facts alone are enough reason for some companies to consider launching an e-mail marketing campaign to find new customers using outside lists.

My advice? Forget it. Unless you want to be labeled as a spammer.

Spam has led to the death of legitimate e-mail prospecting. The harvesting of e-mail addresses from Web pages and discussion groups, systematic "alphabet attacks" against well-known domains (e.g., AOL, Hotmail, and Earthlink), and leaky or bogus opt-in lists all but guarantee that any business will be called a spammer if it sends unexpected e-mails to unsuspecting prospects.

The perception of junk e-mail by customers is so bad that "spam" has become a generic term for any intrusive electronic communication, from unsolicited bulk commercial e-mail to personalized political pitches. Such messages not only generate complaints, but can get an organization in trouble with its upstream Internet service provider if it appears the messages violate hosting terms of service.

IDC recently estimated that, by 2006, e-mail message volume worldwide will double to some 60 billion messages each day -- and up to half of that may be spam. Likewise, Jupiter Research figures that by 2007 each consumer will get 3,900 spam messages a year; that's nearly 11 each day, up from an average of six per day now.

So should marketers abandon e-mail as a tool? Not entirely. Instead, use e-mail marketing for customer retention and to encourage lookers to become buyers.

Recipients should be people who have already had contact with your company, be they current, former, or potential customers. All should have given you explicit permission to communicate with them via e-mail, whether it was during the product registration process, from a promotion or newsletter sign-up on your Web site, or by dropping a card into a fishbowl at a trade show.

And though these folks know who you are, follow these five rules of e-marketing etiquette:

1. Keep it short. If you can’t get your main message across briefly, it doesn’t belong in a marketing e-mail. (This applies differently to e-mail newsletters; see below.) Refer customers to a Web page with more detailed information and to close the sale.
 
2. Keep it text. Not every e-mail client receives HTML-formatted mail properly, especially Blackberry devices, PDAs, and mobile phones. Rich media e-mail with lots of graphics, sound, and animation can be infuriatingly slow to download on dial-up connections that customers may use when traveling. If in doubt, go with straight text.

3. Keep it relevant. If you sell utility software, don’t send your customers a marketing e-mail for, say, someone else’s consumer electronics -- even if a consumer electronics company is a business partner. There’s no easier way to get a reputation as a spammer than by sending off-topic offers. Focus on satisfying customer needs and expectations.

4. Keep it private. State clearly when gathering addresses or in the first e-mail contact what you will and won’t do with someone’s e-mail information. I recommend saying you won’t sell, rent, or share your list -- period.

5. Keep it optional. Make it exceedingly easy for customers to stop getting e-mails from you. Put unsubscribe instructions at the bottom of every message, even if you think it’s redundant. This may seem counter-intuitive -- making it easy to lose a marketing target -- but it’s better than the reputation you may gain by repeatedly mailing recipients that no longer want to hear from you.

If your product or service is conducive to a regular e-mail newsletter offering tips or industry news, by all means offer one. But e-mail newsletters should be informational, not sales-like, in tone, and be no more frequent than once a week (ideally, monthly is best -- often enough to be a presence but not a nuisance). Be brief, under 1,000 words. Rules 2 through 5 still apply.

These days, the only legitimate businesses to unquestionably benefit from blind e-mail prospecting are those selling spam filters. E-mail’s current role in your marketing strategy should be customer service and retention -- at least, until spam returns to being primarily thought of as luncheon meat.

(Frank Catalano, a veteran strategic marketing consultant and tech and toy industry analyst, is principal of Catalano Consulting. He's held interim executive positions with McGraw-Hill, PC Data, Boxer Learning, iCopyright and Apex Computer. He's also the author of two books on marketing. He welcomes feedback via the contact page at www.catalanoconsulting.com.)

Copyright 2003 by Frank Catalano. Permission to redistribute or reprint is expressly denied without permission.