And it's all not nearly as bad as sending me spam for horse pron websites. You can rationalize it however you want. Still doesn't make any of it cool. Why didn't the person I'm already in an email conversation with ask if I wanted to be on the list? Because they know I'd say no (especially when the conversation turns to the fact their company can't do anything for us). That's what makes it opt-out bullshit.

It's not something that gets me hot under the collar, even at it's worst it was a minor nuisance I dealt with over coffee. But after a year having a published address and 4 years of fallout afterwards, I've heard all the bad rationalizations for spam and they don't stand up. I have a polite and friendly "fuckoff" form letter for people without unsubscribe links. The second time I have to send it I CC the technical contacts in the domain's whois record. When someone gets upset or angry at me for doing so, I know damn well that they know they're lying when they try to justify their spam.

This seems like more of a gray area to me. Sending sales material to people who have actually sent queries to your sales department doesn't seem nearly as bad as spamming random people (as long as there's a clear, and working, way to turn the sales emails off if you don't want them).

(not much can be said for badly designed marketing messages though)

People handing over their email address in exchange for user registration or to gain access to a trial version of your product are not interested in receiving sporadic advertising for the next N years.

People are inundated by unwanted email every day, from companies that claim, like Dracula, "but you said I could come inside." Some people don't mind, but some of your target customers will already have very negative reactions to ANY marketing email, so it is incredibly important that you go out of your way to make it clear that you are trying to communicate something that will benefit the recipient, not just a sales pitch you can justify legally sending them.

(2) Again, related to the point above. I'm not bothered by the fact that they are using their software to manage their correspondence, I'm bothered that they tried to pretend they weren't. If I had sent an unsolicited e-mail I would have expected a prompt automated reply. But I didn't send an unsolicited e-mail, rather they reached out to me with questions and a misrepresentation of their knowledge of my company's website.

(3) I made it clear that it wasn't my style but that I understand how others may like it. And I don't agree with the implication that all "web companies" should be measured on different standards/metrics than brick-and-mortar companies.

People should have every right to unsubscribe themselves from that, and thus should have some sort of feedback loop attached to the email being sent (to the detriment of your bottom line I fully understand and sympathize with).

If this was indeed a marketing email, then I don't think it matters if it comes from a "legitimate, paid service" - the receiver still should be able to choose if they want to receive sales related emails wouldn't you agree?

That's not quite how it works from the end-user's perspective.

Say I buy a product or service from you. Of course, you send me billing emails, etc. and that's fine.

The problem is that companies take this further and start thinking they have the "right" to send all sorts of garbage to that customer.

Now, they of course let the customer opt out... if the customer is willing to spend ten minutes digging through their interface. But most don't.

I know you love those newsletters; they make you money. But don't kid yourself that your customers do. Many are going to click 'report spam' if you send too many. Even if it's not spam by the definition that marketers use, it's still very clearly unwanted email, and marking it as spam is so much easier than going through the unique-to-you opt-out procedure. And if your list is like most, some of the members signed up years ago (or bought something from you years ago) and long ago forgot doing so, so of course they are going to mark it as spam.

If you want to send email to your customers, you need to understand this.

Note, I'm not saying that you can't send that email; you can. I send email to my customers, and some of it borders on being "newsletters" - I'm just saying that you need to be aware of the cost- that cost is that it will annoy some of your users. Getting your email marked as spam is only one part of that cost.

>Even if recipients did know about the third party, do you know the switching costs of e-mail? And, you're suggesting that we should wait until all of our affected members get fed up and change providers (hoping that provider doesn't use the same service, etc.)? All of this, when the problem is obviously being caused by the third-party's error, yet they have no responsibility?

My point is that third party has no responsibility to you. They have a responsibility to their customers, but none to you.

Do you have an example of a good sales email that you liked?

What you don't realise is that x number of people join the list and x number of people tolerate being spammed with 'did you know we sell stuff' emails every day for the rest of their lives. x number of those people actually do buy something; likley the thing they intended to buy originally but joined the email list in case a discount code would be the subject of the first 'welcome' email because this is what they have been trained to expect.

All this has been A/B tested and, thus, has been 'proven' to be great business practice.

However every place I shop at takes the sales conversation as an invite to a marketing conversation. That's 90% of my emails.

If business was a dog it would be flatulent.

The quote is referring to email marketing. This seems pretty misleading. I can believe that 91% of people want to hear from some companies. But I'd bet that most people are not interested in hearing from most of the companies they do business with.

There's a simple solution to this. It's called opt-in, and it's not uncommon (although I wish it were ubiquitous). If I check a box (that is by default unchecked) saying I want marketing and promotional emails, by all means send them my way. But I abhor being automatically signed up for emails just by nature of the fact that I made an online purchase.

It's very obvious you've never used an opt-in email list to build and grow a commercial business.

You think Groupon (and the ilk), or Newegg, etc, would see the huge returns from email they do if they were sending out plaintext?

The only thing that really bothers me about your posts, though, is that you try to say things with such a tone of authority. But you just don't know what you're talking about.

But the article is a suggestion for a corporate response. The issues change. A responsible relationship with potential business partners becomes more important than satisfying personal whims about what is spam and what amounts to too many sales attempts.