Marketing Ninja

If there’s one part of online marketing that I loathe it’s dealing with the jerks who write me inflammatory, offensive, and often insulting emails for doing something heinous, like sending them emails. I tweeted the other day about a C-level exec at a Fortune 500 company who sent us some pretty unkind words regarding an email he received from us and I pointed out the stinking hypocrisy of claiming some sort of moral high ground when this guy has profited off of forcing me to watch thousands of his company’s commercials, which are more intrusive and disruptive than an email ever could be.

The fact is that all marketing, to one extent or another, will always depend upon some level of interruption in order to function. Email marketing is a relatively mild form of interruption marketing compared to TV and radio advertising, but there are a handful of people who respond to it with what can only be described as “disproportionate vitriol.”

Now, I dislike direct mail marketing, but not because people are trying to sell me stuff through my physical mailbox. I dislike it because I feel like it’s wasteful – I feel bad for throwing away all of that paper that I’ll never use. I can’t say the same for email marketing – ever since spam filters evolved to a point where actual spam never made it into my inbox I’ve never had a problem with it.

I suspect that the handful of vitriolic responses I receive can be attributed to “anti-capitalist moral indignation” – these people are upset that a stranger tried to sell them something, in their inbox, those evil bastards!!!11! Maybe they’re just upset about the annoyance of having to delete an email, but I think it’s really the fact that the email embodies commercialism to one degree or another which makes them upset.

I’d like to cut down on the number of angry emails I get from people who want to hurt me and the other innocent people at my place of business by explaining the difference between spam and email marketing.

Spam

Courtesy of GMail’s spam filter, here are some spam emails that I’d never seen until I went intentionally looking for them for this blog post:

This email was obviously not sent by Microsoft – if you mouse over the links you can see that the URLs clearly do not link to a Microsoft web property, but rather they link to some sort of sketchy email capture site. So let’s identify all of the sketchy things about this email:

• Misleading Headline - This is not really Microsoft.
• Impersonation of a Trustworthy Company – These people are impersonating Microsoft – they even included MSFT’s Redmond address at the footer of the email, and if I had the guess, I’d say that the copy used in the email was ripped off from a real Microsoft email marketing piece.
• No Unsubscribe Feature – The “unsubscribe” link on this email doesn’t actually go to an unsubscribe page – it takes you to the same sketchy website as every other link in the email.
• Anonymous Sender – My email address (depicted here) is displayed as both the sender and the receiver – I have no idea who the sender really is.
• Unclear Intentions – The email does not have a clear motive or intent. If I had to guess I’d say that this is just a really cheesy traffic driving scheme – they just want people to view the web page linked to the email.

For the sake of comparison, let’s take a look at another awesome piece of spam:

As with the last piece of spam, let’s repeat the exercise – what’s sketchy about this email?

• Misleading Headline – Nothing in this email was seen on CNN.
• Impersonation of a Trustworthy Company - Obviously CNN has nothing to do with this email, but there’s also the subscriber requests address. That address belongs to local industrial equipment retailer in Texas, a company which has nothing to do with the content of this email.
• No Unsubscribe Feature – There isn’t even a remove or unsubscribe link for this email. At least the guys who wrote the last piece of spam had the courtesy to include a fake one.
• Anonymous (Sort of) Sender – There’s a real email address behind this piece of spam, but it belongs to a domain that has been banned from Google’s index and has anonymous WHOIS information. It might as well be anonymous, because I’m sure as hell not visiting that domain.
• Unclear Intentions – Ok, so I’m supposed to get info about my credit score and lower my payments… Or something like that. But… This email isn’t from a credit score provider…. And what payments am I supposed to lower? … What?

I think we’re starting to see a trend emerge. But what about that dreadful email marketing?

Email Marketing

Here’s part of an email marketing piece sent to me by Watershed Publishing, the guys who run MarketingCharts (a site I love.)

The subject line of this email is:

Which Metrics Matter? Why SEM and Analytics Work Together

How did those tricky spammers know that I was an online marketer? Are they spying on me? Do they have my social security number?!?!? Oh, wait a minute.

Turns out that I opted-in to MarketingCharts’ weekly newsletter, and it looks like the publishing company who owns MarketingCharts rented out the list to Omniture / Jupiter Research to promote their free webinar which probably promotes their analytics solutions / research products. Oooohh…

However, I have never opted in specifically for offers from these two companies or from MarketingCharts’ publisher. There was probably some box that I checked (or forgot to uncheck) which said that I gave my consent to be contacted with offers from MarketingCharts’ partners. Does that make this email “unsolicited” in the same way that spam emails are unsolicited? The people who send me angry emails would think so, but I do not.

Let’s analyze this email – contrast this to the spam from earlier:

• Content is Targeted to my Interests – These people know that I’m a marketer or at least interested in marketing, so they built an email that is highly relevant to what I do or what I am interested in doing.
• A Real Company is Listed as the Sender - The publisher has put their logo, their send address, their website, and their real contact information in the body of the email.
• The Content is Attributable to a Real Person – I know that the screencap has cut off some of the body, but the name of Omniture’s marketing guru running the free webinar promoted in the content of this email is listed at the bottom.
• The Production Values are High – Clearly someone put a lot of work into making this email look professional.
• The Content Has Value – This email doesn’t consist of a shillish sales pitch – it actually has some value.
• The Call to Action is Very Clear – They want you to participate in a free webinar, where they will undoubtedly try to generate some leads for their products of course, but there’s no mystery here.
• The Unsubscribe Feature Works – Yes, it does.
• The Email Was Not Entirely Unsolicited - I opted-in to receive offers, I got offers. I can always unlist thanks to a functional unsubscribe feature.

In case I haven’t made enough of a contrast between email marketing and spam, let’s consider this comparison chart:

The bottom line is that email marketers send targeted messages attributable to a specific to recipients who have indicated that they are open to such offers; spammers send untargeted, often deceptive messages to anybody willing to open an email.

Spammers also don’t make it easy for you to unsubscribe or unlist, whereas it’s in the best interest of email marketers to make it easy for people to do so.

Spammers provide very little value, whereas email marketers always try to provide substantive, valuable, relevant, and useful content in their communications with you.

Email marketers are not spammers, and spammers are not email marketers. Spamming is not marketing as it is counter-productive to everything that legitimate marketers want to accomplish.

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