Bulk email marketing or the method of sending bulk emails to all the possible mail addresses on a mail server or addresses acquired from some source or the other is called spamming. This has been quite an infamous practice over the years but curiously not completely without some success. When online marketers send bulk emails, it can be argued that their actions are no different from the more familiar in-your-face actions by TV advertisers. The only difference between the mediums of television and the internet is that one can be switched off when you go to work while the other is a part of your work and personal life; therefore, becoming a possible impediment to your workday. This is just at the personal level.

When you consider the scale of spamming and mails that are sent, it can be observed that there is a considerable dent made to the bandwidth availability and therefore increases the amount of money spent by ISPs. This is the reason for the crackdown on spammers and the governing legislation in the US against spam is called the CAN-SPAM act. This act effectively allows spammers to mail users but users have the option to unsubscribe from unsolicited mails. However, this is not a perfect mechanism and spammers live in a world where there are no rules.

Diatribe on the rights and wrongs aside, the question is, “Does bulk email marketing affect sales?” This is a tough question to answer because it comes down to figuring out if people would buy a product just because someone, somewhere was sending bulk emails to a random bunch of people. Oddly the answer lies in the reality of the fact that spammers are still around, years after the first spam mail was ever sent out.

 It can therefore be deduced that when spammers send bulk emails, someone will read it and buy it. Now it can be duly ascertained that the people who actually pay attention to spam are few in number and probably not enough to call a decent majority but this is where the magic of spam comes into its own. Spam costs nothing to the sender. Once a spammer harvests email addresses, through means that are mostly unethical if not illegal, the mails are sent from a server that is not paid for by the spammer. This means that it is the end user that pays for the cost of spam whether a prospective customer or not.

Cost and a few odd sales tip the scales in favor of bulk email marketing. However, as for the overall practice of sending bulk emails, there appears to be an overall dip in spam traffic and it is safe to say that online marketers who believe that randomly trying to send bulk emails as a method of sale could be in for a paradigm shift in the years to come.