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Current Trends In Email Marketing - Page 2 of 6
A Hunter and Associates Review -
November 2002
1-SUMMARY
| 2-SPAM | 3-COMMERCE
| 4-PERMISSION EMAIL
5-WHAT PEOPLE THINK | 6-HOW
TO DO IT
SPAM
Spam exists because it's profitable. People open junk
emails, and purchase from them. Spam will not go away until it's forced out or
blocked perfectly. Blocking software used by individuals and by ISPs is still
far from satisfactory. Consumer groups are combining to prevent spam from impacting
cell phones. In September, California became the first state to ban spam to cell
phones and pagers.
Spam has become more aggressive. Spammers send mail through
unprotected Web accounts hijacked temporarily for the purpose. And opt-in, permission
email lists have been hacked and used as spam lists. In the case of SparkLIST,
a major email services provider used by many independent businesses involved in
legitimate online marketing, newsletter publishers using the service first suspected
problems when subscribers began reporting that spam had come to addresses used
only for the newsletters. Note that it was end users who detected the spam first.
Who's fighting spam, who's aiding it
About half the states have anti-spam laws, but the direct-marketing
industry has lobbied to keep tough federal legislation off the books. The legitimate
email marketers are afraid that tight regulation will eliminate their own abilities
to prospect for new customers. This resistance is changing, as more mainstream
companies wake up to the enormous marketing value of email, and want in. As permission
email booms, the growing spam epidemic becomes one of the online business world's
largest problems.
But although companies can't really have it both ways,
they try to. With tight marketing budgets and the need for results, companies
are blurring the distinction between legitimate email marketing and spam. Direct
marketers who have spread into the Internet are trying to tie their existing postal
profiles to email addresses right now. The general pushiness of commerce manifests
in a kind of near-spam, not necessarily as detested by consumers as pure spam,
but equally easily deleted.
Jupiter Research forecasts that you will receive 2,257
pieces of "commercial email" by the end of the year, 60% of them unwanted
spam and the rest from merchants you've given permission to contact you. By 2006,
both kinds will double.
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