Spam vs. E-Mail Marketing
Unfortunately, e-mail marketing has gotten a bad rap, thanks to the phenomenon of spam. I’m sure you’re familiar with spam in its many forms—the offers for pornographic sites, bogus male enhancement products, low-cost medications, the letter from a businessman asking you to invest in Nigerian oil stocks, etc. But you might not be aware of how significant the problem of spam is.
Think about this: The amount of spam that you get in your e-mail inbox is only about one-half of 1% of the amount of spam that tries to enter it. About 99.5% of the spam messages that are sent to your e-mail address every day do not get through. Most ISPs (including Web-based e-mail services such as Gmail and Yahoo) do a good job of protecting you from spam, but occasional pieces slip in. So if you get only 5–10 spam messages per day, that means between 1,000 and 2,000 spam messages were sent to your e-mail on that day but didn’t get through!
Many marketers shy away from e-mail marketing, afraid that any e-mail offer they send out will be viewed as spam. But in doing so, they miss out on an effective marketing tool. A 2011 survey by CSO Insights found that 55.2% of all companies surveyed listed e-mail marketing as their most effective lead-generation tool, in terms of generating the best quality and quantity of leads.1
The reality is that many people do buy legitimate products from unsolicited e-mail offers. A 2009 study by ExactTarget found that over 50% of all Americans have made a purchase as a result of an e-mail message they received.2 Also, in 2011, the Direct Marketing Association reported that e-mail marketing brings an average ROI of $40.56 for every $1 spent. The same report predicted that e-mail marketing will bring in $67.8 billion in sales for 2012.3
E-mail marketing can be a very useful tool for lead-generation marketers. If you know the right ways to use it, it can provide you with a high number of actionable leads.