E/M/47. Email Marketing Ethics and Privacy Issues

The rise and prominence of the Internet has brought about several opportunities to a company attempting to further its reach and maximize its revenue. Many companies today have willingly embraced the idea of email marketing. To the layman, this means the advertisement of products and services online through the medium of electronic mail or more popularly known as email. The convenience of sending electronic mail has become one of the better mediums in conveying a particular message across several thousands, even millions, of people. The sending of email is faster and is much more efficient as opposed to Ósnail mailÔ which is the common term for regular postal service offered by the UK Royal Mail Service, for example. With this newfound efficiency in the presence of email, there is also a growing concern about unsolicited email which is also referred to as spam. This particular brand of unwanted email traces its roots to the 1990s and now has become a real and undeniable threat to both companies and email users alike. With the advent of this particular form of advertisement, a significant number of problems have taken place from the consumption of company resources in the form of network bandwidth to the loss of a significant number of transactional data that is beneficial as well as necessary to the receiver. Paper addresses the important issues involved in email marketing. And also touches on the privacy issues in sending of unwanted email and presents principles in permission marketing strategies.