[Re: “Loose Cannon: Will E-mail Be the Death of RFM?” DIRECT Newsline, January 27, 2003] And Letter to the Editor, January 28, 2003 from Tony Kudalis]
I’ve never responded to one of your newsletters before, but I disagreed with both of these stories and felt the need to vent a little.
Like most consumers with an e-mail account, I get frustrated by the enormous amounts of spam on my personal account. As a consumer, if you make one mistake and sign up with the wrong company, your email address is sold forever and you feel like changing your email address. Who’s at fault here? The customer who bought or responded to something on the Internet? The companies soliciting our business? The list vendors? Lack of database marketing intelligence? The death of RFM?
We’re not seeing a decline in intelligent database marketers, quite the contrary actually. More and more people have embraced database marketing techniques in their routine business, and we have more collegiate professors teaching it now too. What we’re really seeing is a ton of unethical, get rich quick scammers jumping on the email bandwagon and destroying the credibility of email marketing. Just the thought of getting a list of email responders and immediately selling it to 100’s of other companies to immediately solicit a person is scary. The seller obviously doesn’t care about the consumer, because most of us don’t want 100 junk emails. In 3 days, one of my personal accounts can get 1000 junk emails. Wouldn’t it be nice to turn solicitations on or off by category when you
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