With today's demand for advertising and marketing, it is simply irresistible for companies not to use the internet as their means of marketing. One of the most preferred online marketing methods by companies is "Email-Marketing". This form of online marketing is a practical investment for businesses since it is free, reliable, and highly effective. Unlike snail mail that takes a long time to reach its audience, this type of marketing speedily reaches its target viewers without the company even spending a single cent.
These advertisements are the same emails we see happily multiplying in our inboxes. Although their method of attack had not changed, the same emails that usually presented its content in simple black texts and white backgrounds are now equipped with colors, images, designs, audios, and videos - all of which are strategies to coax you to check out or even purchase their products.
These charm-filled online advertisements are actually becoming a problem. Commonly referred to as "spamming" or "junk mail", the problem is basically the sending of unwanted commercial messages to recipients not wanting to receive such mails. These emails are now considered as online pests as they fill up the internet with billions of unwanted emails. Estimated to make up more than 80 percent of all e-mails in circulation, there had been growing concerns over the spreading of these "unethical marketing strategies". Efforts to ban these junk-mails succeeded only in some domains but not in all. Still, the spread of spam e-mails continued to fill the net. Despite all the measures and the attempts to control, limit, and to some extent cease the scammers' persuasive "junk mails", e-advertisers seemed to be persistent in their endeavor to plague the net with unsolicited e-mails as long as they can get away with it. Another reason to get all upset about these spam messages is the fact that most of these e-mails contain viruses. Some of these viruses are actually products of networks intended to be infected with the purpose of acquiring private information from the general public. Moreover, it is said that spammers all over the world created partnerships and networks with other individuals of their kind ensuring us of a "spam" filled future. They even created a program or method of gathering e-mail addresses of people intended to be sold to other spammers.
E-mail marketing is a revolutionary way of advertising a company's products to potential consumers but may pose a threat to the general public when abused.
A resolution to this problem is for businesses and companies to send e-advertisements to recipients who agreed to be given these messages. This would require the companies to ask for the target consumers' consent resulting to a more organized and ethical way of marketing. This process is called "permission-based-email".
Even so, companies should acknowledge that there is a thin line between "spamming" and "permission-based-emails". It is the responsibility of the companies to respect the border between these two for abuse of their customers' consent may lead to their consumers' distrust. As brilliant as the idea may seem, it still poses a disadvantage for those who abide by the said resolution due to the fact that abuse of e-advertisements will always remain rampant as long as marketing and internet access last.
