In many ways, email marketers must perform a careful balancing act. They need to weigh many factors to determine the best course of action to promote their companies.

One crucial area in which this can be seen is email advertising. Obviously, every company has the desire to reach as many consumers as possible with its marketing efforts. However, pursuing this goal without any mitigating concern can have significant consequences.

Email blasts and impersonality

One of the most significant consequences of mass email blasts can be damage to the company’s brand reputation. Jacky Tan, addressing this issue for Business 2 Community, recently pointed out that because they are so unspecific, email blasts may seem like spam to recipients.

If this is the case, an individual will likely lose respect for the company. No one likes to receive spam. Not only is it annoying, but it also reveals that the sender does not think of you as an individual. Instead, it becomes clear that the company sees the person as an email address and nothing more.

This is not the case with targeted emails. By using list management tools, organizations are able to tailor their email messages for specific groups, making them more personal and more relevant to the recipients and thereby improving the brand’s reputation.

A timing problem

Another reason why email blasts may damage brand reputation, according to Tan, is that the timing may be less than optimal, and even damaging. Again, because the email lists are not segmented, no strategy is at work in determining when individuals receive the company’s emails. This can lead to problems.

For example, consider a customer who visits a clothing company’s website and, after searching the offerings thoroughly, purchases a few pairs of jeans. The next day, he receives an email blast with an offer for a discount on jeans. Not only will this annoy the customer because he spent more money than he needed to, it also reveals that the company does not know that he just made a purchase that almost certainly makes this offer irrelevant to him.

Pamela Vaughn of Hubspot recently highlighted this point. As she pointed out, different customers exist at different stages of the buying life cycle, with some closer to making a purchase than others. By creating an email marketing campaign that takes into account these timing issues, a company will have much more success with its email advertising efforts.