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Is mass marketing is still viable for profitable business?

When email marketing, what is the line between 'mass-personalization' and spam?

  • I'm trying to understand the difference between mass spam email and personalized, marketing automation. I know that, under the 2003 CAN-SPAM Act, I shouldn't scour the web for email addresses related to my business and send a mass email to thousands of people. But I can probably send a single, personal email to 1 or 2 people asking if they're interested in our services. With today's email marketing / marketing automation tools, I can effectively send thousands of 'personalized' emails, each slightly different, coming from a different person, at different times, etc. So I can make it look like a single person sending a few inquiries over time. Is that still illegal (or at least discouraged)? How can I learn what the relevant rules/laws are in various countries, so that we don't tarnish our email (and brand) reputation?

  • Answer:

    It's still spam. It's spam if you send mails to people who haven't asked to receive them and it's still spam even if you use an automated tool to make small changes or create fake sender addresses to make the spams look like real emails. This is certainly strongly discouraged and is illegal in many jurisdictions. There are two ways to make your mailings legal. The most common is to build a list of people who have asked to receive your mails. The other would be to create by hand a personal message for each person.

Andrew Hennigan at Quora Visit the source

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You can usually tell if an email is ''spam'' because of numerous elements. Firstly, if an email is scattered with typos it's usually ''spam''. If a company have sent an email for an email campaign they will ensure that typo's are non existence. Secondly, if an email is covered in imagery it's usually considered spam because of the lack of text content. Text content always takes longer than adding an image, so you have to think people who spam will want to produce an email in as little time as possible. Hopefully this helps.

Lee Callender

Speaking now as an employee of an Email Marketing Software Provider, I concur with Andrew on this. If the person hasn't specifically opted in to receive your email, it's spam. Disguising it as a "personal" message pushes it into the black hat territory of phishing.

Jim Morton

Sending personalized emails to a   targeted list of cold contacts is not spam. What it sounds like you'd   be interested in doing is Email Lead Generation - having the ability to send   lead generating emails to a list of cold contacts. P.S. Clickback's software   is one of the few who can handle this type of sending.

Katie Watters

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