Email marketing and spam

The uninitiated often confuse email marketing with spam. Although they operate on the same principle, there are a number of differences. While spam will always be sent via e-mail, e-marketing can be carried out via other electronic communication media, such as instant messaging or social networks.

Email marketing is a legal way for a company to promote and sell its products to the general public. It’s an alternative to traditional sales media such as telephone sales, telemarketing, flyers on plain paper and so on. Like spamming, email marketing is based on a list of potential customer addresses. The latter will be built up as the sale progresses, or collected by various legal means such as setting up websites. Sending an email marketing campaign is usually done after the recipients have given their approval. They will be targeted according to their needs, not blindly.

The frequency with which email marketing is sent is also a good way of differentiating it from spam. In a single week, only around 40 promotional offers, 20 targeted e-mails, 20 personal e-mails, 10 newsletters and less than 5 service e-mails such as invoices will be received in a person’s inbox, compared with several hundred junk e-mails. Unlike spam, the sender’s e-mail address is of vital importance in email marketing. Internet users won’t hesitate to read and act on it if they feel confident. They will immediately delete any e-mail from a dubious sender, regardless of the subject.

In the field of email marketing, the subject of the e-mail sent may be a discount, a free product, a famous brand, exceptional information, a product preview, free delivery, etc.

There are a number of reasons why Internet users might not respond to an e-mail marketing campaign. Security comes first, due to online payment and the exposure of personal information. Then there’s the lack of appeal of email marketing and the absence of human contact.

Spam is also known as junk mail or spam. Sent en masse to Internet users, its only mission is to rip off those who follow up, which is not the case with email marketing. Unsolicited by recipients, spam can arrive at any time in their inbox if their e-mail address has been snatched up by Internet pirate robots and integrated into their database.

Spam is hard to get rid of, unlike email marketing. Even the unsubscribe link on a junk e-mail will only confirm the existence of the recipient. The products offered by spammers in their spam are often taboo items, forbidden for sale in a given territory or difficult to find in the general trade. To get rid of spam, Internet users file it in their junk mail box as soon as they receive it, block the sender, report it to the relevant authorities and install anti-spam software. For email marketing, some people don’t hesitate to use a specific email address so that their personal address cannot be accessed by spammers.

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