Outbound marketing, also known as interruption marketing, refers to any kind of marketing where a company initiates the conversation and sends its message out to an audience. It is the opposite of inbound marketing, where customers find the company when they need it. Outbound marketing includes various techniques such as TV commercials, radio ads, print advertisements, tradeshows, outbound sales calls, and email spam. It is considered to be an annoying version of the traditional way of doing marketing, whereby companies focus on finding customers through advertising.
Outbound marketing is generally harder to track and less profitable than inbound marketing, yet organizations still spend as much as 90% of their marketing budgets on it. With outbound marketing, companies cast a wide net and hope to gain customers by repeatedly imposing their messages on them without knowing whether the customers want to receive those messages. This is commonly referred to as the "spray and pray" method of marketing, where a company disrupts a persons flow of activity to get their attention.
