I dialled in to the #mpworld event from Marketing Profs on Friday, which was an excellent virtual conference featuring the likes of Anthony Schneider (@anthonyws), Brian Clark (@copyblogger), Sonia Simone (@soniasimone) and Frank Days (@tangyslice).

One comment in particular from that last speaker has stuck with me over the weekend, which is the reason for this quick post.

“An email that no one clicks on is spam,” he said, at one point.

I get the point. If an email is useful and actionable the call to action is usually a click of some kind. But isn’t spam defined by the recipient rather than the sender?

I can think of a few emails that I regularly receive that I rarely click on. If I considered them spam I’d unsubscribe or – failing that – report as spam. But they are useful in a wider sense. I might read them but not click through. Usually they make me more likely to interact with a company through another channel and some are even among my favourite newsletters. The sender might not know it but they’re a success.

On the flip side, the worst case was a company whose service I used regularly but it unsubbed me in a periodic database clean-up, obviously considering me a lemon – someone who sat around and provided little value to them. Or perhaps the assumption was that their newsletters had become my spam.

The result was that I now almost never go to any of their properties. Out of sight, out of mind.

Elsewhere in that virtual event someone defined the difference between content and content marketing – the latter results in a response of some sort. I get that. But I also get that you can’t have a response every time you engage an audience member.

I’m betting that Frank also gets that – but the point about making content actionable is noted.

*Photo: cookipediachef via photo pin cc
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