Etymology can save your life.

I've always been (as a French man) impressed by how etymology of the English language could help have a good understanding of a words' meaning.
Let's take a couple of examples:
- Tourism: The activity of touring an unknown place.
- Proactive: Being active before action is needed (anticipating)
- Computer: Machine used to compute data.
- Direct marketing: Addressing directly your clients and potential clients with an advertising message.

Concerning the Etymology of Direct Marketing, I think it also means the Marketing message as well has to be direct.

I was this week in Spain, and I had a meeting with one of our newly signed clients to discuss features and make some tests.
When he showed me his email creative I almost choked:
The creative was just soooo big, with soooo much information, sooo many products that nothing really raised out of the lot (I'm talking here about an email so long you could drop dead while scrolling to reach the footer).
Get my point here: a Direct marketing email is no according to me an opportunity to send over an e-catalog to your potential clients, it's all about teasing the potential client to get him to your website (or shop) and to eventually buy something or registers or whatever is important to you.
One other thing: if your email is that long and your unsubscribe link is (as it was on this template I saw) in the footer, then it's very likely the user won't have the patience to search for it and will just press the complaint button.

I beg you: if you read these lines, keep your advertising messages short and punchy, don't ever think putting every single product you sell in an email will make it sure one will find what he looks for.
It's a war out there! People receive tons of advertising emails every day, it's very unlikely they'll spend over a minute reading them (the ones they care to open) you have to make your point quick and good.