Is email harvesting bad?
Step 1: Harvest TONS of emails in your niche.
Step 2: Blast them with your sales pitch.
Clever growth hacking? Or cheesy spam?
Is cold emailing any different?
Where is the line?
What is the law?
Discuss.
Step 1: Harvest TONS of emails in your niche.
Step 2: Blast them with your sales pitch.
Clever growth hacking? Or cheesy spam?
Is cold emailing any different?
Where is the line?
What is the law?
Discuss.
I always have better success when I write personalized cold emails. It is more tedious, but more rewarding, in my experience.
I don't doubt that.
Though, my intent here is to start a conversation on the ethics and legalities of email harvesting.
I have an impression of marketing campaigns that use large email-harvested lists as SPAM. As "bad." Because of course, nobody likes spam!
Yet I'm also aware that spam converts, otherwise spammers wouldn't send it. So some people do like it.
On the flip side... a delicately worded, personalized cold email is also unsolicited. That's what makes it "cold." Yet I consider cold emailing to be "good," or at the very least an acceptable thing to do.
But if cold emailing is "good," and mass email-harvested emailing is "bad?" And both are unsolicited... then what's really bad about SPAM?
The lack of personalization?
Irrelevance?
The massive scale?
Intrusion into the recipient's inbox?
A deliberate scam / phishing attempt?
I think I have an answer, but thought it would be good to get some conversation going around the issue.