It is standard policy at my current place of work to respond to every email we receive to our website contact email address. There are exemptions for spam, but cold-call type marketing emails are not included in spam.
Our website does very well in search engine rankings for a lot of career-related topics. So, we're regularly inundated with copy-pasted, barely tailored to us spammy marketing emails requesting we add a link to their product or website on our own site.
If this was regarding one of my personal websites, I'd delete it and blacklist the sender (or their domain if it seems warranted) without a second thought.
However, because of our policy where all emails that are not outright phishing must be responded to by a human, you may find you are required to issue these sorts of emails with a reply. If you find yourself in this position, I've spent some time perfecting my wording on a response email template that you are welcome to use:
Good morning/afternoon [name],
Your email regarding adding a link to your organisation's website on [page] was recently brought to my attention. We have elected not to include the link on our website.
Regards,
Sure. It's simple. That's the charm. The less you give them, the less the (probably) human somewhere behind the automated mass-marketing software is likely to try to convince you otherwise. In the last three years, I've only had one mass-marketer reply to this template asking for a reason (of course, they were never going to be happy with whatever we replied with).
(Yeah - it is pretty funny that what we wind up with is one human initiating a robotic template email which then results in another human responding with an equally robotic template email. Something something hyper-realistic simulated world something something.)
I used to provide a reason by default with every email, but nine out of ten times this would elicit a reply where the marketer tried to convince me they were exempt from this rule.
Keep it short. Don't give reasons.
Again, in an ideal world, you'd delete these emails straight away. But if you're like me and these things are forwarded to you by your team as part of a mandatory response process, this is the next best thing.