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Comment by Signez | Hacker News Reader

I understand that it may improve "engagement" and reduce churn, but gosh I hate those "follow-up" emails.

For example, I'm currently trying out PagerDuty, and those pesky emails about "how to configure whatever you've already configured" are really annoying. At least, please take a few minutes to code something to check if your "beloved new customer" already have done what you are suggesting them to do.

My time is quite precious. Please don't waste it by suggesting things you can figure out I already know.

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100% agree on the companies overdoing email automation. Just look at my "Promotions" tab in gmail. 1000 unread.

I believe one of the reasons this happens is limited trigger types for email sequences and even more limited support for customizable content in the email (I know Mailchimp does this). Because of that you are left with primitive trigger types like time than something more granular like trigger based on user app activity.

By bringing the automations closer to the application source code, I believe you can build in "engagement" and "rentention" mechanisms that don't suck.

What you wrote triggered in a thought in my head.

Eventually, once SaaS subscriptions become more commonplace among the rest of the population, a significant number of people are going to be annoyed by the disconnect between the automated emails they receive and the features they’ve already tried out as a new user.

One or two people will see an opportunity and take VC money to fix the disconnect: a way to make email automations smarter by deepening the integration between ESPs and SaaS code bases, as you have done with this oss project.

You can do this sort of thing in Intercom - only send an email if they haven’t accessed X for example.

That’s what we do at Paiger and it’s a fantastic way to ensure people reach the “Aha” moment.

Intercom is the worst of the lot. To the point I've adblocked it haha

Do they still do that godawful beep while you're trying to read?

The developer in me doesn’t disagree, but it does lead to a significant amount of inbound leads that would have been lost otherwise (We tested it).

Our market is marketers though, not technical people - if it were, I suspect the results would differ.

Aye that is fair, I mostly dislike intercom because I I've only ever interacted with it when it's been telling me the bleeding obvious (to me)

Oh nice, I didn't know that!

We use Intercom and Mixpanel for VisualSitemaps.com.

Sadly their Mixpanel "integration" is very basic and does not sync up the most important engagement data which Mixpanel tracks for discreet features. So the only way to set that up is with by writing your own custom api syncing().

Check out Grouparoo [1] for your syncing. We are working on Intercom now.

[1] https://www.grouparoo.com

Our team at Mailscript.com is working on exactly that. Would love to chat some time to bounce ideas.

They work disturbingly well for normies.

It’s depressing isn’t it.

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