On my daily tour across the blogosphere, I came across this tidbit from Chip House at DMnews.com:

In the 1970s dystopian sci-fi thriller “Soylent Green,” Charlton Heston, as Detective Robert Thorn, discovers the secret source of the green tablets that he and his fellow Earthlings have ingested and declares, “Soylent Green is people!”

I bring up this item of relatively obscure Hollywood trivia to make a point about the way most e-mail marketers regard their e-mail lists. They often look past their individual customers and treat their lists as if they’re undifferentiated blobs. To these marketers, I want to say, “E-mail lists are people!”

I think this is such a simple and profound statement. Email lists are people. We so often get caught up in growing and building our lists that, at some point, we lose perspective and forget that we haven’t created some wonderful amorphous blob, but have assembled and organized a list of people who are interested in what we have to offer.

By recognizing this simple, elegant statement, we can engage people — not just yell messages at “it.” Think about this the next time you send out a promotional email. Are you playing a numbers game, simply “blasting” out a message to as many people as you can, hoping that some of your spaghetti is going to stick to the wall? This sort of strategy reminds me of one of my all-time favorite quotes:

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.
– George Bernard Shaw

If your only hope it so send email to as many people as possible and pray for the best, you aren’t communicating, and you are definitely not marketing. You are winging it. That’s a heck of a bad business model.

• Growing your email list (of people!) is obviously important. There are many ways of doing it. Very, very rarely do I ever recommend a client buy a list. But if you ever do, be very, very careful.
• Did I mention “blast” in the above post. Shame on me.
• Still not sure why it’s important to treat the people on your list as people? Check out item #3 on this list of ways email marketing can go wrong.
• A topic strongly related to this theme of lists, people, and blasting emails is that of “SPAM.” Dianna Dilworth raises our awareness of stopping SPAM before it begins.
• Is opt-in dead? Great response here and here.