The GDPR is working: could this signal the end of e-mail marketing?

There’s growing panic in the e-mail marketing industry: the immense majority of mails sent to data bases to comply with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) are either eliminated, go straight into junk folders, or even worse, are used to eliminate subscriptions, with very few people asking to be kept on a mailing list. The industry will have to remove about 80% of people from their databases or risk fines of up to €20 million or 4% of their global income.

The panic in the e-mail marketing industry is good news. Did anyone really think that anybody their right mind was going to ask to be on a list they never even knew they were on? Except for a few newsletters or lists one really has signed up to, which are usually few, e-mail marketing goes straight into the trash can. The e-mail marketing industry, which was hoping to generate earnings of $22 billion by 2025, is a plague and we can only hope that every business operating in it goes belly up as soon as possible.

The companies involved have used every legal loophole to inflict pain on us over the years. That they have collected emails through crawlers, they have bought and sold lists and have appropriated email addresses of people who never asked to be included on any list and who simply filled out their data in forms requesting information, while others were included because they were considered influencers. Then, they have deliberately ignored every request to be removed from those lists. I receive messages every day from companies that I have unsubscribed to time and time and time again, to no avail. Fortunes have been made by unscrupulous marketeers and the authorities have turned a blind eye.

If you have been ignoring all those emails about GDPR, deleting them without opening them or taking advantage of them to unsubscribe, you are in luck: you will have contributed to eliminate some of the most disgusting predators on the internet. Companies with a database of people who had knowingly given their permission to receive information, have not had to ask for further approval. Companies that have sent messages asking for permission to keep sending you mails are either misinformed or did so because at some point they bought lists of addresses from some shady broker or engaged in marketing malpractices.

If the e-mail marketing industry disappears in its entirety, good riddance. Because, although its incessant abuse led us to accept it as “a necessary evil”, it should never have existed in the first place. And don’t give me that “we do e-mail marketing, but we do it well”: to begin with, e-mail should not be used for commerce, and much less a place where anything goes and it’s permissible to send junk mail to people who didn’t ask for it. E-mail marketing will be remembered along with door-to-door selling and cold calling. E-mail should be a communication tool between people, not river of electronic sewage destined to end up in the spam folder and which bases its efficiency on its minimum costs.

The conclusion is very clear: the only good e-mail marketer is a dead e-mail marketer. A series of regulations introduced in response to popular demand seem to be doing their job. If the EU’s initiative succeeds in eliminating most of the garbage we receive in our mailboxes and provide us with a tool to report abusers, it will be fully justified. And now that we are talking, how about applying the GDPR to the physical world by banning mailing, putting flyers on windshields, handing out brochures in the street and other trashy marketing channels that litter our cities and fill our mailboxes? Wouldn’t it be nice to take a piece of junk mail from our mailbox, and be able to resend it to some authority and punish the advertiser with 4% of their global turnover? In the much-needed reinvention of marketing in the future, let us hope that, at least, we have left behind these out-of-date methods.

(En espa?ol, aquí)