Who is selling my email?

Emails I never asked for are constantly bombarding me. Companies keep trying to get my attention by getting right in my face. They ask me to unsubscribe when they know darn well I never subscribed to their list in the first place. The definition of this is spamming.

I have a dedicated email for reputable services that I sign up for yet strangely enough this email seems to be showing up in my inbox but attached to a variety of garbage products and service sites that I have never heard of.

My first and obvious question is, “how did they get my email?” If you were running a company with a large email database would you risk your reputation by selling that list to a third party? Even if the company did not sell the list deliberately the list with my email did fall into someone else’s hands.

So that gets me thinking about the company that purchases such a list. Do they have a marketing department that has actually promoted such a strategy? The carpet bomb approach using marketing grenades is to send out thousands of emails in the hopes of getting a 1% return rate. Once the company has the attention of this 1% then they hope for a conversion rate that is a percentage of that 1%. You can do a variation of the math but no matter how I calculate it, it never equals a sustainable business model.

Many companies using these approaches hide behind the façade of something they call Digital Marketing (which I consider a ridiculous term). The companies make the assumption that what they have to sell is of great value and all they really need to do is get a “Digital Marketing Guy” to pull off a few technical tricks and drive as much traffic as they can to their online presence. “Bring them in and they will buy!”

I think too many of these companies are focusing on the wrong thing. I see it in my mailbox everyday. As a company, someone responsible is asking the wrong question. Instead of asking, “How can we push as many people as possible towards our storefront?” They should be asking, “What value can we add that will change someone’s life for the better?” Great products and services that add value will always get noticed. Fanatical users are the best sales force any company can have. Just ask Apple.

If you are working for a company using this strategy then please tell them to create value, but for everyone’s sake, stop throwing these poorly thought out marketing grenade campaigns at people. They will most likely blow up in your face.