[drieddust]

Agreed but how do you establish the relationship in the first place?

Then only options I see is to a) hope google finds you interesting enough, b) paid advertising, or c) word of mouth.

What are the other methods ? I am asking because I can't think of anything else.

[zrobotics]

Have you considered that this type of marketing is actually counterproductive? If a company spams me, and I notice it, it's guaranteed that I will avoid them like the plague, regardless of how good their service is. This is poisoning the well. It might get >5% of the people spammed interested, but what if the other 95%?

[growt]

It doesn't work like that, for two reasons:

1) If the mail you receive actually interests you, you wouldn't classify it as "spamming" ("Did I really sign up for that? Anyway it sounds good"). If not you may avoid them in the future, but you would not have bought their product anyhow.

2) Scale: If a (real) spammer sends out 20 million emails and 0,0001% buy viagra. Thats fine for him. The other Emails cost him close to zero, so every sale it profit.

[yellowapple]

To build on this: it will result in mail classifiers treating your future emails (even if they're actually solicited) as spam. So not only is it counterproductive (or at the very least inefficient) for generating leads, it's also textbook self-foot-shooting.