Everyone hates email spam. Those irrelevant emails about things you just don’t care about that you get every day, the ones that flood your inbox. They’re especially annoying when you’re waiting for an important response to that business correspondence. You get an email notification, excitement pushes you to check it out and then there’s a total anti-climax. “Oh. It’s just spam.”
It feels, with all these spam emails, like email sending is just redundant. Why bother with this medium of marketing if you’re going to be instantly labelled spam and ignored? At this point, most marketers are stuck because…what else is there? We’ve had email marketing for so long that we’re dependent on it, even though it’s hindering us. Although…is that entirely true?
A quick look at spamming on social media…
Recently there’s been a lot of comparison between email spam and social media marketing. A lot of people think that because Twitter and Facebook are so popular and current, they must be better than emails. But we believe there’s a problem with that method of thinking.
Spam can be seen as any finite post from or one-sided communication with a company that you aren’t interested in. This includes all the emails accosting you, trying to get you to buy something you didn’t expressly say you wanted.
Yes, it’s true that most of these come through email. It’s been there long enough, there are enough people to contact, so of course, that will be where most of the spam activity is going on. But it can also come from other places too. For example, social media.
Have you ever noticed those “promoted tweets” or “suggested posts” you see on Facebook and Twitter? You know, the posts that seem to have nothing to do with you personally, but are often just ads from big companies like Google or someone offering a PPI refund (yes, that’s still a thing). All of that is technically spam. Only once in a blue moon does it mean anything to you.
So how can we stop spam?
Marketing emails are often sent out because you signed up to receive them from a company or a number of companies. Because of that, at least a handful of the emails you get that you might label as spam are actually not. It’s the real spam that’s the problem, ruining the medium for the rest of us marketers.
You need to always make sure that your email campaigns are relevant when you send them out to people, or you’re just adding to the problem. Segment your data, take the time to find out what your contacts are genuinely interested in and send them content based on this.
Always remember that coming across as spam is a possibility, so put the effort into your campaigns to try and erase as much possibility of this as you can. Don’t send more than one email in the span of a day. If you can help it, try and space out your email campaigns evenly. Just always keep your clients in mind. Figure out what you consider as spam in your own inbox, then avoid sounding like that.