I bet that each and every single one of you has received far more than one piece of spam email in your life probably even today. Each and every one of those Spam emails is designed to be sent to as many people at once regardless of them wanting or needing the product in the hope that the receiver might have a need and will buy.

I like to think of Spam Emails as the equivalent of the industrial fishing that takes place today. You increase the ability to catch more fish (send more emails in this case) and you grab as many fish (customers/sales) that you can. The result…well up here in Scotland there we have started to do major damage to our fishing stocks and seriously endangered many species of fish and the same thing is now also happening to the effectiveness of email marketing. I find myself receiving so much junk for some of my websites that I have to increase the rules on my spam filters to the level that even some of my genuine emails get caught into the spam filter causing me to glance through the spam box each and every time.

The result of all this unrequested mail was initially frustration then anger and now its only mildly annoying but I can promise you one thing and that is I will never ever buy from a spam email.

The problem lies with the fact that these marketing campaigns obviously makes these spam marketers money and is therefore probably not something they are going to stop unless people stop responding to that form of marketing.

My hope is that as a result of this massive wave of trash being emailed around the web today will affect the younger generations who are usually for more technology savvy than their parents. I believe that they will get annoyed very quickly by this marketing trend and easily spot these emails and refuse to buy from them. Maybe that is just my wishful thinking but its a nice thought.

Some of you are probably thinking that well if it works for the spammers then why don’t I do the same, afterall we all have expensive lifestyles to be feed and we all want that shiny new Aston Martin. Well if you are going to go down that route then you are going to find that you are a very hated person and you will never be able to build a stable and trusted brand. You are also going to have to keep purchasing new spammy domain names that don’t even make sense, to send your emails from and direct your customers too as I will be one of the many people who write to your ISPs to get your sites brought down. You cannot build a strategy based on mass harrasment in order to gain profit and not expect people to react badly to being abused by your campaigns. Just imagine receiving 500 leaflets a day through your letter box from people trying to sell you junk you dont need each and every single day.

Ok…Rant over but you would be ranting if you received over 500 spam emails a day telling you about medical problems that you never knew you had and that you can buy these wonderful things to fix them.

Now that I have rambled on and used some very strange examples involving the Scottish fishing industry it is time to discuss the benefits of building good, solid and respectful marketing campaigns.

Its all about looking back at the basics of marketing which is to identify your customers need and directly provide them with that solution as efficiently as possible. This means that you do not take the spammy approach and bombard millions of people who don’t want to hear from you in the hope to catch a few who do.

If you are looking to build a reliable long term business that will develop a good reputation then you are going to want to treat your customers and potential customers in the same way that you want to be treated yourself.

There are many different roots you can choose to do this and some may take longer than spam campaigns but in return you will have a much stronger brand which I believe is a much more beneficial long term strategy.

First of all I would hope that you are already providing a service that solves some kind of problem or meets peoples needs in some way or another. Now you are going to want to let people know that you have solved all of their problems if they choose to use your product or service. This is where you can get real creative depending on what the style or tone your brand and its messages take on. The following is a list of possible methods of getting business come to you:

1. Viral Videos
2. Viral Games
3. Banner Advertising
4. Forum / Blog Advertising
5. Text Link Advertising
6. PPC Advertising

Those are just a few suggestions and you will be able to find many more ideas on this website to look into and test.

I hope I have been able to highlight the importance of marketing responsibly in order to build good relationships with your customers and who knows maybe a spammer out there might read this and change his wicked ways.