Every day I am asked if email marketing is dead. Every day I have to take this question and reply with "no need for coffins for email marketing."
I have been seeing a great divide in email marketing among marketers and I think it's because the gray areas of it are dissipating. The spam folders on my servers seem to catch around 2400 spam emails a day. In addition to those, I get another 300 to 400 each day which are mostly caught by ZoneAlarm and Malwarebytes on my devices.
Those caught by my server, I rarely ever look at. I log in once a month to my servers and simply blacklist all that my servers catch, only to have the spammers use a different service and/or proxy the following month.
On my physical devices at home and office I actually look through the sender's info on some, read through the copy on some, take notes, and then block them.
What I have found is that my server is great at finding the big spammers out there, and there are a bunch. My home and office devices catch those that get through the server mostly due to spam filters having no reference to them, YET! But I always report them.
The ones that get through are generally those that come from someone's optin list I belong to. I often see a reference in an email saying something like, "Hi, my name's Mr. Blah Blah Blah and I'm a friend of Mr. Blah to whom you subscribe. He thought you would be interested in this offer."
Now I am simplifying here, but the context is accurate. It just goes to show you that the new spam is in the sharing of lists (though most everyone says they don't share their lists). I recently caught one that had come from a list I was on with a very high profile marketer (all of you would know him). I new how to reach his office and spoke directly to his assistant whom I had met at a conference a couple of years ago. I explained how disappointed I was. She went on to reminisce a little as we eased into the conversation about the emails I had received with someone else's return email and referencing Mr. Blah in the body of the email. She in fact verified that it was legitimate. She said that their TOS clearly states that occasionally some of Mr. Blah's associates are exempted from the sharing policy because they sometimes work together. Therefore, I get unsolicited email (lawfully) because their updated TOS allows for it.
Email marketing is not dead. It is still, and I expect always will be, a very viable tool for my promotions to those on my DOI lists.
How about you?
I have been seeing a great divide in email marketing among marketers and I think it's because the gray areas of it are dissipating. The spam folders on my servers seem to catch around 2400 spam emails a day. In addition to those, I get another 300 to 400 each day which are mostly caught by ZoneAlarm and Malwarebytes on my devices.
Those caught by my server, I rarely ever look at. I log in once a month to my servers and simply blacklist all that my servers catch, only to have the spammers use a different service and/or proxy the following month.
On my physical devices at home and office I actually look through the sender's info on some, read through the copy on some, take notes, and then block them.
What I have found is that my server is great at finding the big spammers out there, and there are a bunch. My home and office devices catch those that get through the server mostly due to spam filters having no reference to them, YET! But I always report them.
The ones that get through are generally those that come from someone's optin list I belong to. I often see a reference in an email saying something like, "Hi, my name's Mr. Blah Blah Blah and I'm a friend of Mr. Blah to whom you subscribe. He thought you would be interested in this offer."
Now I am simplifying here, but the context is accurate. It just goes to show you that the new spam is in the sharing of lists (though most everyone says they don't share their lists). I recently caught one that had come from a list I was on with a very high profile marketer (all of you would know him). I new how to reach his office and spoke directly to his assistant whom I had met at a conference a couple of years ago. I explained how disappointed I was. She went on to reminisce a little as we eased into the conversation about the emails I had received with someone else's return email and referencing Mr. Blah in the body of the email. She in fact verified that it was legitimate. She said that their TOS clearly states that occasionally some of Mr. Blah's associates are exempted from the sharing policy because they sometimes work together. Therefore, I get unsolicited email (lawfully) because their updated TOS allows for it.
Email marketing is not dead. It is still, and I expect always will be, a very viable tool for my promotions to those on my DOI lists.
How about you?
