Faked Sincerity - The Battle of Quality Over Quantity in Marketing
Genuine Relationships Can't Be Purchased
By Spider Graham
As a marketing educator who has been in the email marketing space for much of my career, one of the conversations I have had many times over the years with my clients is the value of having a list of people you can contact who genuinely are interested in the products and services your organization offers.
Because of CAN-SPAM compliance law in the United States, the easy reality for email marketers is that they are legally required to only send emails to those people who have given them express permission to do so. When prospects opt-n to be a willing recipient, it opens a fair exchange space for marketers to share their value propositions with prospects and customers. There's a lot to be said about the value that this approach gives marketers because in reality it allows them to develop genuine relationships between their brands and their prospects.
That said, at the same time many modern marketers are also being pressured to amass a large following on email (and other channels like social media) and this can lead to the temptation of buying or renting followers. While this might seem like a quick fix, the long-term consequences can be detrimental, leading to disconnects with the audience and an ongoing financial drain to maintain this artificially inflated base.
As the great comedian and actor George Burns once pointed out, “The key to success is sincerity. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made’. Humor aside, the true key to success in the modern age of marketing IS sincerity and that means taking the necessary time to develop meaningful relationships with the people you want to become your future customers.
While CAN-SPAM compliance law makes it very clear that buying email audiences in verboten, that doesn’t mean that it can’t be easily done. Simply Google ‘email lists to buy or rent’ and you’ll find a very willing list of vendors who would like to sell you some people. However, this approach is the antithesis of how modern marketers are reaching set goals. As we’ve discussed in this blog in the past, marketing success is about reaching the right people and not the most people.
Purchasing followers can create an illusion of popularity and influence. On the surface, high follower counts can appear impressive, but this strategy lacks genuine engagement. Real success on social media and email campaigns is measured not just by the number of followers but by the interaction and engagement these followers have with the content. Artificial followers, typically bots or inactive accounts, don't engage with content, leading to abnormally low engagement rates. This disparity can damage credibility, as savvy users and potential business partners can often tell when followers are bought.
Genuine followers who are interested in your brand or message are more likely to engage with your content, share it, and ultimately convert into customers or loyal fans. When followers are bought, you lose the opportunity to build a community of real people who care about your brand and are willing to advocate for it. Consider them silent partners who are willing to tell their friends about how much they like what your business can do for them.
Another downside of buying access to large groups of people is that it often becomes necessary to keep throwing money into the machine to maintain those numbers. From stories about Facebook advertisers discovering that after spending money to reach people they need to keep spending money to continue to have access to those same people, to very high unsubscribe and bounce rates (not to mention spam complaints) for companies buying and using rented email lists, buying people often creates a financial burden with little to no return on investment.
I’ll also mention that these practices can damage brands. For example, if an email marketers were to use a rented list to reach out to possible new prospects, spam complaints by recipients who are well aware that they are not part of an opt-in audience, can greatly affect the sender reputation of those companies among Internet Service Providers (ISPs) who are responsible for delivering those emails. The results of a damaged reputation can include having more legitimate emails being filtered out as suspected SPAM messages and even having IP addresses being fully blocked so that no emails can be sent through that ISP in the future.
The bottom line is that in order to be successful marketers need to grow their audiences organically. They need to develop real relationships with prospects over time. They need to understand the needs and desires of the people who have given permission to be contacted to the brand.
As marketers we can’t buy friends from other people.We need to develop those relations ourselves. At the end of the day, having a small group of people who genuinely care about the products and services we offer is so much more powerful than a large group of rented strangers who do not.
About Spider Graham
Spider Graham is the Founder and CEO of Gravity Clamp and has been a fixture in digital content marketing for nearly 30 years. As a technology writer and strategies trainer, Spider spends a lot of time thinking about ways to make content marketing even more powerful and offers AI Marketing focused training and consulting services. Check out Gravity Clamp’s free course on AI Marketing Fundamentals while it's still available to learn more.