Most of us really hate spam (I’m not sure what to say about anyone who actually likes the stuff – either in the tin or in your inbox!). When you cold email a list that you’ve bought or acquired from some database – it almost always looks like spam.
And yet, people are still sending out these cold emails for one cold, hard reason: they work.
Just because a marketing technique works (well, sells in the short term – it’s arguable whether that’s marketing that ‘works’) doesn’t mean it’s something that necessarily should be done – especially if part of the fabric of your business is ethical business practice and ethical marketing strategies.
But it’s hard to just throw the baby out with the bathwater, especially when you actually kinda need the profit to keep your business alive, right?
There is a way that you can still use the cold emailing strategy without spamming a whole lot of people who absolutely don’t want to hear from you…
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Is it possible to ethically email a cold list? In today’s video I’m going to discuss whether you can email a list of email addresses that you’ve bought in an ethical way.
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Should I Do Cold Email Marketing?
The reason that I want to talk today about cold email marketing is that this actually came up in discussions with one of my clients.
The client offers a product for schools and they came up with a new product that would be really helpful to schools right now. And they were giving this away for free. They were giving it away free in the forums they’re in, to their email list that they already have.
But they were like, “We want to reach out to more schools we want to give them this stuff because it will help right now.” And it was a very time sensitive product.
They came to me asked, “How do we reach more schools?” and more specifically asked me, “Should we buy an email list?”
Will Cold Emailing Make Me Look Like I’m Spamming People?
They were a bit hesitant about buying a list, “We don’t want to look spammy and we don’t want to be THOSE people who are spamming others.”
This is completely understandable and we definitely do not want to spam.
I will repeat, we do not want to spam!
But there is a way to send out an email to a list in a way that’s not spammy and remains within your ethical boundaries.
2 Factors To Make Cold Emailing More Ethical
When you’re trying to email a cold list there are two factors that you need to keep in mind if you want to stay within this ethical boundary or at least the ethical boundary that I would like to keep within.
The first factor is that you need to make sure that your list is your target person. If your list is not your target person then you’re going to look like spam.
The second item is that you need to make sure that whatever you are sending them in the first email is adding value. Is adding a lot of value. Is adding like maximum value you could possibly give this person.
These two things are kind of a little bit interlinked.
In this particular situation, it was super easy. You know, the list was definitely the target person: you could get the list of the head teachers of the school or you could get the list of just the general emails for schools. And the email that they were sending them – high-value. It was a free resource that they could fully use right now. All they had to do was enter the email address to download it.
For them it was super easy, but I can see how this gets a little bit more complicated.
What Happens When You Can’t Get A List Of Your Target Person to Cold Email?
One situation where it might get a bit more complicated is where you can buy the list but some of them are not quite your target person. You might be a bit like, “Uh I don’t want to look like spam to them.”
And you are absolutely right to hesitate. Do not… DO NOT email a list where some of those people are not your target person. Especially if that email is not going to add any value to them.
If your resource, your product that you are releasing in that first email is not relevant to even some people in the list, change the email.
If you can’t make sure that the list is exactly the target person, then you need to make sure that your first email adds value to every single person who actually is on that list.
The fact is when you buy an email list it will have some sort of category. You’ll have bought something according to an industry or a location or something that you can use to craft a product or some sort of message or item that you send out to be relevant to everyone in that list.
And if you can’t do that then abandon this strategy.
What Happens When You Cold Email With No Value?
If you do email people when it’s not relevant to them, you are probably going to damage your reputation. I mean, you’ll get some sales. You will. You will end up reach the people that you want to reach as well – but you will also look like a spammer to the others.
This isn’t just some like, “We don’t want to look bad” reputational issue. If your emails get reported as spam, it becomes more difficult for you to send emails to others. The email providers will punish you for it.
This isn’t just about staying within ethical boundaries. It’s staying within the boundaries that will keep your marketing strategy able to continue into the future.
That’s a little bit on like the ethics of cold email marketing. Obviously, it’s a much bigger topic.
If you are thinking about doing cold email marketing if you have some questions about it feel free to put it in the comments below feel free to email me or the place you can probably reach me easiest is on my on the Facebook group, Marketing for the Many.