Spam email converts at a whopping .00000008% or gets 1 response for every 12.5 million emails. According to Tech Radar while spammers still make money off this conversion rate it makes one wonder how important it is to have a permission based list.

There’s roughly 300 million people in America (some place it at 350 million).  From what I’ve read there’s internet it only 150 million homes but for the case of this example let’s say 250 million people had internet and an email address.  At the measly conversion rate of 1 in 12.5 million I would get only 20 responses by spamming the entire country!  That’s super inefficient.

Even though this example is about spammers it is still important to note that a lot of companies do not employ best practices for permission based marketing and still don’t do a great job at segmenting their lists so their messages are on target.

Permission based marketing is so much more efficient.  First off the end users are not upset to receive a promotion from a service they’ve opted into.  The content is likely to be a lot more relevant and the likelihood of churn from that list even if it is not targeted appropriately is still lower becaue the user probably recognizes the sender.

Marketing guru Seth Godin has written a book on the subject that is so relevant even today and I highly recommend that everyone in Marketing should own a copy of it!

Spam image by Holley St. Germain.