Why should you care about other people's bad email marketing?

Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on August 30, 2007

Loren McDonald is leading the charge to get more people clued up on the rights, wrongs and best practices of email marketing.

Now you might wonder why you'd care if other marketers are messing up with email. Why would you want your competitors to learn the kind of skills and success tactics taught by Loren and others in the space?

I'd welcome any comments on that, but here's my argument...

1. It's not just about your competitors. It's also about educating those around you: colleagues, superiors and those holding the purse strings.

The better people understand email marketing and its potential contribution to business success, the more support you get. And the more support you get, the more email's contribution to the business turns from potential to reality.

It's not about making email better than other marketing techniques. It's simply about giving people the information they need to make the best use of that resource.

2. The success of your emails depends a lot on the context they are seen in. The more spam, bacn and rubbish emails filling up inboxes, the more people are turned off using email, or signing up to lists or spending time with commercial messages.

So to keep email attention high, we need to do two things:

1. Support all sensible efforts to get rid of spam
2. Encourage businesses to send engaging, relevant, valuable email

A side benefit is that other players in the email game (ISPs, anti-spam vendors, users) will become implicitly more supportive of legitimate marketing email, if the difference between that email and spam gets stronger and stronger. As it would if more businesses learnt and followed best practices.

This is a tricky one, though. I've argued in the past that the morass of mediocre emails is an opportunity. Quality emails stand out.

But the more quality emails in there, the harder you need to work to stand out from the rest. So encouraging wider use of email best practices could make your job harder.

However, I feel the broader benefits of clean inboxes are greater...provided you accept the challenge of always striving to make your emails among the best.

Convinced?

More on tactics and strategy | Tags: email marketing best practices, spam

[This post brought to you by Campaigner Email Marketing]
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