Would you ever use spam as an email strategy to promote a fundraising effort for the Singapore Zoo. Why or why not?

Would you ever use spam as an email strategy to promote a fundraising effort for the Singapore Zoo. Why or why not?

Email marketing is a form of direct marketing which uses electronic mail as a means of communicating commercial or fund-raising messages to an audience. In today’s world, e-mail marketing quickly became the preferred method of contact for businesses looking to cut expenses, connect with buyers and increase profits. In a matter of minutes, it was possible to use software programs to blast thousands of e-mails to prospective clients. Also, email campaigns could be deployed quickly and tested in a very cost-effective manner (Shari 2005, 36).

Recently, email marketing has given rise to the growing incidences of “Spam email.” Whether one calls it unsolicited commercial email, unsolicited bulk e-mail, or junk mail, spam is defined by the fact that the recipients did not solicit the mail or divulge their email addresses for the purposes of receiving such mail (Mendel 1999, 122).

Although, currently, there are a lot of companies use spam as a mean to promote its products or services, but it is suggested that Singapore Zoo should not use spam email as its email strategy to promote a fundraising. There are several reasons will be discussed in detail below to show why Singapore Zoo should not use spam.

First of all, by using spam as an email strategy , Singapore Zoo can be really hard to ensure that its email advertisements are getting through to the intended targets’ inboxes. Today, all of the email service provider’s action to enforce more powerful spam filters to help email users to catch this type of email and automatically dump them into spam folder. Furthermore, even if email reaches to email user inbox, there is no guarantee that individuals will bother reading an e-mail from someone who is not in their contact list (Blanzieri and Bryl 2008, 63-92). According to the report, legitimate e-mail servers averaged a delivery rate of 56%; twenty percent of the messages were rejected, and eight percent were filtered (Ayres and Funk 2003, 77-137). As a result, it creates low email delivery rate for Singapore Zoo.

Moreover, a Singapore Zoo’s reputation can be damaged if they keep sending spam email. When email advertisement is viewed as spam, recipients are likely to send complaints to Singapore Zoo because of the inconvenience and annoyance that they have to suffer from. This situation will negative influence Singapore Zoo reputation. Additionally, negative customer experience can lead to bad word of mouth. If a person receives an email campaign from an organisations with a damaged reputation they are more likely to mark an email as spam thus damaging reputation further (Ray and Schmitt 2003,5 -13).

Most importantly, if Singapore Zoo violates the CAN-SPAM Act, it may suffer stiff penalties, up to $16,000 fine per violation for sending out spam mail. While this law remains largely unenforced, there have been several high-profile cases where perpetrators have been sentenced with 70 days to five years in prison, and charged fines ranging from $10,000 to $1.3 million for violations’ Even though e-mail marketing is very inexpensive to Singapore Zoo, the outcome could wind up costing a lot more if a judge deems the commercial messages "useless spam” (Hu, McInish and Zeng 2009, 87-104).

Overall, “spam” email strategy is considered as useless and ineffective advertising tool, as well as it will bring several disadvantages to S if they employ “spam” as their email strategy, such as create negative company reputation. Therefore, it is recommended that Singapore Zoo should not use spam to promote its fundraising.