Email Marketing by the Numbers: How to Use the World’s Greatest Marketing Tool to Take Any Organization to the Next Level

Chapter 13. Are You a Spammer?

You know what they say: Admitting that you have a problem is the first step to recovery. I understand that a spammer isn’t necessarily something that you aspire to become (if so, you probably shouldn’t be reading this book). But somehow, despite best intentions, we can get sidetracked. We take our eye off our constituents’ needs and send them irrelevant junk via email. And the next thing we know, our spam complaints are through the roof, and we can’t even send an email to our own mother because our IP address has been blocked everywhere.

By definition, spamming is the abuse of electronic messaging systems in order to send unsolicited, undesired, bulk messages. Therefore, a spammer is a person or organization that engages in such abuse.

In Chapter 3, I mentioned that spam may fall into the category of “permission spam,” which encompasses both explicit opt-in and implied opt-in. Although a relationship does exist in the case of permission spam, it doesn’t prevent these emails from qualifying as junk.

Because I have already covered some of the high-level characteristics of spam and the issues associated with getting a reputation as a spammer, I’m going to turn the stage over to ExactTarget deliverability specialists who can take us through deliverability consequences of spam in much greater detail.