Why Spamming Has No Place in Inbound Marketing

Email marketing plays a crucial role in both lead generation and lead nurturing for Organisations. Much of this is achieved through inbound marketing tactics like automated workflows, which rely on carefully segmented lists to ensure that their messages are as clickable as possible. But just having someone’s email address doesn’t give you the right to spam them. It’s important to bear in mind that any email sent to an end user who has specified they don’t want to receive it is considered as spam.

Your prospects are more likely to ignore you

People are becoming increasingly unlikely to open messages they haven’t agreed to receive. Instead, they choose to routinely delete all messages that aren’t from companies that they have subscribed to. They are also more likely to increase the strength and add criteria to their spam filters, which means programs are more likely to flag legitimate email as spam. This is a real threat to any company that relies on email marketing and it means legitimate marketers must do their best to avoid it.

You’ll experience a backlash towards your organisation

By spamming, instead of engaging with your prospects through legitimate inbound email marketing, you will not only be ignoring what your potential customers want and expect from you, but you will also endanger your brand reputation and deprive yourself of future opportunity with these leads. After all, why would any prospect want to engage with or require any more information from a brand that is annoying them?

You’ll lose business through word of mouth

If you annoy your potential prospects, you’re going to lose their business and the business of their friends. Your prospective prospects are surrounded by ads and messages from competing organisations. If your emails are an unwelcome visitor in their mailbox, they’ll hit the spam button, avoid engaging with you and instead engage with one of your competitors. Spamming a prospect will cause them to distrust you and they’ll have no hesitation sharing this sentiment with their network.

Ways to ensure you are not spamming your prospects with email marketing

There are several things you can do to determine if your prospects will view your messages as spam:

•  Do the sniff test

Simply look at your emails and ask yourself: is this email helpful, educational and relevant to each recipient? If not, don’t send it.

• Take notice of complaints

If you have multiple prospects approaching you to complain about your email communication you need to take immediate action. By getting back to you, these prospects show that they still value your organisation. By changing your offers or your content, you could re-engage them and ultimately gain their business.

• Look at your metrics

Email marketing data can indicate a spam problem. Collect and analyse data on how many emails were delivered, opened, and clicked on. If your results are significantly below industry standards, it’s a good indication your emails aren’t relevant or interesting to your prospects.

• Look for high unsubscribe rates

If you have inadvertently crossed into spam territory, you’ll notice a high number of ‘unsubscribes’ in your email metrics. If your unsubscribe rates are higher than the industry average, or have suddenly skyrocketed, it’s a sign your prospects are viewing your email as spam.