Toward a Sustainable Email Marketing Infrastructure

Abstract

Email marketing is a legitimate, lucrative, and widely used business tool, but it is in danger of being overrun by unwanted commercial email (also known as spam). Conventional approaches to maintaining the robustness of legitimate email attack pieces of the problem. In contrast, this article asserts that the email marketing infrastructure is a complex system requiring holistic analysis. A system dynamics model is developed to identify the underlying dynamics and enable an examination of alternative mitigation strategies. Results reveal that the system conforms with the limits-to-growth generic structure, filtering may have the unintended consequence of increasing the global amount of spam, and the unexpected increase comes about because better filters can actually assist spammers by mitigating an information deficit.

Keywords: Email, marketing, spam, system dynamics, computational model, simulation