Ever watched someone throw spaghetti at a wall to see what sticks? That’s essentially what spray and pray marketing is – except instead of pasta, you’re flinging your precious marketing budget and hoping something magical happens.
Companies have burnt through sizable figures with this approach faster than a teenager with their first credit card at a mall. But sometimes, just sometimes, it actually works. Let’s get into why most marketers should avoid this strategy like week-old sushi and why a select few might strike oil in this much-maligned approach.
What exactly is this madness?
Spray and pray marketing is precisely what it sounds like: You ‘spray’ your marketing message across as vast an audience as possible and ‘pray’ that it resonates with anyone. It’s the marketing equivalent of asking everyone at an event or conference for their number instead of having meaningful conversations with people you’re interested in.
This approach typically involves:
- Sending identical cold emails to thousands of prospects.
- Blasting generic ads across multiple platforms simultaneously.
- Purchasing massive, untargeted email lists.
- Running broad social media campaigns with minimal audience refinement.
- Dropping your business card on every table (yes, people still do this).
In lead generation specifically, spray and pray often manifests as sales teams working through enormous lists of cold contacts with minimal personalization or qualification.
The thinking goes: “If I contact 1000 people with a 1% conversion rate, that’s ten new customers!”
Mathematically sound?
Perhaps.
Efficient?
It’s about as efficient as hunting for truffles with a bulldozer.
Why savvy marketers are facepalming right now
Before we talk about when spray and pray might be justifiable, let’s be clear about why it’s generally a terrible approach:
Costs you could be sweeping under the rug
The simple conversion math above ignores the very real costs of spray and pray:
- Brand damage: Nothing says “we don’t care about you specifically,” like obviously generic outreach.
- List burnout: You only get one first impression with a prospect.
- Deliverability penalties: Email providers aren’t stupid – they know when you’re spamming.
- Wasted sales time: Your team could be nurturing qualified leads instead.
- Regulatory risks: Various jurisdictions have anti-spam laws with teeth (GDPR anyone?).
A marketing director at a SaaS company once told me:
“We thought we were being efficient by automating outreach to 50,000 contacts. Three months later, our domain reputation was in the toilet, and we couldn’t get emails delivered even to people who wanted to hear from us.”
The backfire effect
When people receive mass-produced outreach, they don’t just ignore it – they actively develop negative associations with your brand.
Research from Gartner found that 74% of B2B buyers choose a company that understands the buyer’s specific business needs. Spray and pray does precisely the opposite.
The rare cases when spray and pray don’t end in tears
Despite everything I’ve just said, there are specific scenarios where a high-volume, lower-personalization approach might make strategic sense:
When you genuinely have no idea who your customer is
If you’ve launched something truly novel or are entering an entirely new market, you may not know who will respond to your offering. Casting a wide net while closely monitoring results can help you identify unexpected audience segments.
A case study to remember:
TaskRabbit’s early days are a perfect example. The company’s founders initially had no idea which demographics would embrace its service marketplace concept, so they marketed broadly and discovered that busy professionals and elderly users were their primary audience segments – two groups they hadn’t specifically targeted.
When you’re fighting a time constraint
Some product launches or promotions have a narrow window. Spray and pray might be your only option if you’re promoting a time-sensitive offer where speed trumps precision.
Political campaigns often face this reality in their final push – they simply don’t have time for spot on targeting in the last 48 hours before an election.
When unit economics make it viable
If your product has extremely high margins, unusually high lifetime value, or exceptionally low marketing costs, the equations may favor volume over precision. This explains why credit card companies and mortgage providers still use relatively broad targeting – the value of each converted customer is so high that even wasteful acquisition methods remain profitable.
How to make spray and pray slightly less terrible
If you find yourself in one of those rare situations where spray and pray is justified, here are ways to mitigate the damage:
Segment the firehose
Even broad marketing can benefit from basic segmentation. Divide your massive list into three-five broad categories and slightly customize your approach for each.
Build in learning mechanisms
Spray and pray will only become less wasteful over time if you learn from it. Implement tracking systems that show which segments respond better, and continuously refine your approach. You can also include different call-to-action variants or subtle message differences across segments to gather intelligence even while you’re spraying.
Prepare for the cleanup
Before you launch a high-volume campaign, have plans in place for:
- How you’ll handle the (hopefully) high volume of responses.
- What your follow-up process will be for interested parties.
- How you’ll remove uninterested prospects from future campaigns.
The fastest way to turn initial interest into lasting resentment is to generate leads you aren’t prepared to handle correctly.
Be a sniper
While there are those exceptions to the rule cases where spray and pray makes sense, the public is moving decisively away from volume and toward precision:
- Data enrichment tools make it easier to identify high-potential prospects.
- Marketing automation platforms enable personalization at scale.
- Intent data providers can tell you who’s actively researching solutions.
- Account-based marketing approaches focus resources on ideal-fit companies.
The most successful lead generation programs I’ve seen in recent years all share one characteristic: they contact fewer prospects with greater relevance rather than more with generic messaging.
Knowing when to spray and when to aim
The decision to use high-volume approaches should be deliberate, not default.
Ask yourself:
- Do we genuinely not know who our customer is?
- Are we under extreme time pressure?
- Does our unit economics make the volume more important than precision?
If you answered “no” to all three, step away from the spray nozzle and pick up the sniper rifle instead.
It’s not about the most significant contact lists – it’s about acing relevance.
Frequently asked questions and answers
Is spray and pray marketing ever acceptable in 2025?
In limited circumstances – when you don’t know your audience, face extreme time constraints, or have economics that favor volume over precision. Otherwise, more targeted approaches will almost always yield better results. Consumers expect personalization as a baseline rather than a luxury. That said, sometimes the sheer number of customer acquisition costs versus lifetime value can make spray tactics viable in very specific industries. Just know you’re swimming against the current of both consumer preference and technological advancement if you go this route.
What’s the biggest risk of spray and pray marketing?
Beyond wasted budget, the greatest risk is brand damage. This damage spreads faster than a wild fire. Some companies have needed months to recover from the blowback of particularly tone-deaf mass campaigns. Your prospects don’t exist in isolation – they talk to each other, especially in B2B environments where industries can be surprisingly small worlds.
How can I tell if my marketing is too “spray and pray?”
If you can’t clearly articulate why you’re reaching out to each specific segment, if your messaging could apply to almost anyone, or if you’re measuring success purely by volume rather than relevance indicators, you’re likely in spray and pray territory. Another red flag: when your team celebrates hitting “send” on a massive campaign before seeing any results. The hallmark of true spray-and-prayers is the obsession with input metrics (number of emails sent, ads displayed) rather than output metrics (qualified meetings booked, sales conversations initiated).
What’s a good alternative to spray and pray for lead generation?
Account-based marketing (ABM) represents the opposite approach – focusing significant resources on a smaller number of ideal-fit prospects with highly customized outreach. For most B2B companies, some versions of ABM will outperform spray and pray. The beauty of ABM is its scalability – contrary to popular belief, you don’t need to limit yourself to just a handful of accounts. Technology now enables ‘programmatic ABM’ where you can apply targeted approaches to hundreds or even thousands of accounts while maintaining the personalization that makes ABM effective.
How do I transition away from spray and pray if that’s what my company is currently doing?
- Start by analyzing your current customer base to identify common characteristics of your best customers.
- Use this to create an ideal customer profile, then gradually narrow your targeting while increasing personalization.
- Track conversion rates throughout this process to demonstrate the improved efficiency to stakeholders. The key word here is “gradually” – cold turkey transitions rarely work in organizational settings.
- Consider running parallel campaigns – one with your traditional approach and one with a more targeted methodology – and let the results speak for themselves.
Sometimes, the only way to convince spray-and-pray devotees is to show them the numbers. Once they see that sending 80% fewer emails resulted in 200% more meetings, the light bulb usually comes on rather quickly.
