email marketing and getting responses

To make a broad generalization (although not as broad as the obnoxious one above), the entertainment industry tends to be driven by face-to-face networking. Can you attend relevant events, or schedule the occasional lunch with your existing contacts? Email really is the easiest thing to ignore and not feel guilty about.

People are busy. I've had people that totally ignored business development outreach from me (email and phone) totally out of the blue reply to a 6 mo old email when they had something to talk to me about. So keep staying in touch every 6-8 weeks or so. It'll eventually pay off.

Some people are bad about email. Others just aren't in the habit of responding to emails unless they have something substantial to say. If they had a job for you right then, they'd reply to you, but otherwise they just file "ljs30's looking for work" away in the back of their minds and go about their day. I've sent lots of "Hey, have a job for me?" emails over the years. Some people respond with an "I'll keep you updated!" right away, and others never respond at all. There seems to be little correlation between "gets back to me right away" and "actually gives me work." You've done your due diligence by checking in with your contacts and keeping them updated on your availability. You could certainly hassle them more aggressively to elicit a response, but that has just as much of a chance of backfiring as of helping you.

I don't think anything about the no responses, it's how email works. (And no, it's not specific to the entertainment industry. Or to douchebags.) Some people get dozens or even hundreds of legitimate email in their in-box each day, so even a short message to each one would take most of the day. Often the real decision makers in a business don't respond to emails unless there's a specific action that needs to be taken. Do more of it, you'll get over the burn.

It really depends what it is you're doing. If it's a personalized email to someone within the company that you previously reported to for the same kind of work, I agree that it's odd that you haven't heard back*. If it's a personalized email to the general company email, you don't know who's on the other end. It could be some intern who has no idea who you are or what the proper protocol is. If it's a mass email to all your work contacts and containing a form letter, especially if it goes to one of those main clearinghouse accounts, it's either going straight to the spam filter or being screened as such by some assistant/PA/intern. Also, for what it's worth, I work in the entertainment industry as someone's assistant, and I spend a lot of time dodging pushy sales calls and triaging messages. Nothing personal, but if we aren't interested we aren't interested. I usually try to respond to obviously personalized emails/messages, but if it comes off as even vaguely spam-like, I don't bother. Oh, and I will lie to you as needed ("he's not in the office right now", "she's interested but unfortunately the studio makes all those decisions", "I'll definitely pass along your message"...) if it gets me off the phone faster. *Unless it's someone who is likely to be mega-swamped; sometimes I don't hear back from production coordinators on films currently shooting. They have better things to do than send a courtesy reply back to the likes of me.