Value

The Social Side of Advertising

• steve
• Industry

Most of the time when you’re sending bulk email you’re sending to a fairly anonymous list of email addresses. If you’re a good email marketer you’ve got a fairly good idea of their demographics, where the email addresses came from and maybe that they’ve purchased things from you in the past. But they’re still strangers – a “pre-existing business relationship” is not a relationship.
What would you do differently if all those recipients were people you knew? Friends, colleagues, family – people with faces and names and stories and real relationships with you, rather than a database query or a spreadsheet full of addresses? Would you send the same emails if you expected to be meeting some of the recipients for a drink after work the next day, or handing out candy with them this evening?
And on the flip-side of that… if a company wanted you to send a typical junk message to everyone you know – coming from “you” directly to the inboxes of all your friends, associates, colleagues and family – would you do it? If you would, how much cold, hard cash would you want to be paid for each message sent?
I really want to know what you think. Leave me a comment.