Email Marketing to Developers | Hacker News Reader

Email Marketing to Developers

ronakganatra.com

50 pointskuba_dmp34 comments

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> we found that none of these “styles” really resonated much with devs. Open rates were low, many marked us as spam

Spam:

1. (uncountable, rarely countable, computing, Internet) Unsolicited bulk electronic messages.

2. (uncountable, computing, Internet) Any undesired electronic content automatically generated for commercial purposes

[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/spam]

If many people marked you as spam, maybe that's because the messages you were sending were exactly that: spam?

My reaction to all marketing emails is one or more of:

- Delete

- Flag sender as spammer in Thunderbird.

- Click unsubscribe link.

- File abuse complaint with sending service.

I have never bought anything in response to a marketing email.

Strongly agree.

The more that time goes on, the more that I feel like email is predominantly a combination of "automated account features" and "ambiguously-actionable spam". I'm sure some folks have meaningful communication via email, but for me - as much as I hate to say it - email is mostly a dead medium in which everything is suspicious by default because SNR is overwhelmingly low.

It's not an issue of the template that you use or the CTAs that you include. These emails are always useless noise. I don't need a welcome message from the CEO or check-ins to solicit feedback.

Spend less time on marketing and more time making your product good.

Been getting some lately that sound like breakups / suicide notes.

Subjects:

“Don’t Delete”

“Goodbye” (received today!)

“I’ll take this as you don’t want to speak to me”

“Can you help? I’m so sorry”

Tech sales getting real desperate!

Hilarious to characterize those as sounding like suicide notes. But people use those subject lines because they are extremely effective at getting high open rates, above pretty much everything else.

Looks like spammers are a few years behind! When this one arrived there was a moment where I thought Jimmy Wikipedia was going to off himself and had mass mailed a suicide note

https://img.imgy.org/jxYY.jpg

The examples, casual or not, are automated but are missing "unsubscribe" links. Perhaps they are just cropped out from the screenshots, but if they're indeed missing, that's a "Report Spam" for me.

I lean this way as well. I usually signed up for these emails in the first place so I am more than willing to unsubscribe when I'm done. But the minute you don't include an unsubscribe link, or have anything beyond one-click unsubscribe, I'm marking every recent email of yours spam.

Follow the rules and I will go out of my way not to hurt your metrics or your business, but don't and I'll go out of my way for the opposite.

It doesn't matter if they are automated or not. If I didn't opt into marketing emails when I signed up they are illegal in many places. (Canada, California that I know of for sure)

I specifically dislike it when they sent emails persistently with content along the line of "Maybe you have not seen my previous email?"

The second reason that I do a report-spam is when google cannot automatically unsubscribe and a browser tab opens and I should type an email address and confirm.

The worst are the ones that send back a confirmation that I have unsubscribed.

There are some pretty big names in oss with enterprise offerings that are doing this kind of communication.

I have a close friend who I won't name. He has a note on his LinkedIn that says "I will never buy anything from you if you call me or email me without you asking" with a list showing the people and companies that have screwed up.

I have literally seen him talk to someone and be like "hey, check my linked in again" just to have them react to their name and company being on the list. You don't need to market to developers, a good product only needs three things: what it costs, documentation that is usable and code snippets I can run my preferred language.

Your email campaign is rarely ever going to help me unless the email specifically tells me what you're product does for me and doesn't include any bullshit marketing or other whitepaper crap.

> You don't need to market to developers, a good product only needs three things

How do you find it, though?

Word of Mouth, Proper SEO on your Website, Advertising in Dev Channels?

Basically everything other than sending me spam. Your cost to send me spam is nearly zero while my cost to sort and read your spam is rarely zero so you will be punished harshly for sending me unrequested emails.

My mail server has a great script: all emails that are not encrypted with my PGP pubkey are automatically deleted. It's so nice to sort out all the useless broadcasting.

Hopefully one day I will be important enough to afford to activate this script.

Many devs disable images, especially to professional accounts precisely to avoid tracking pixels, phishing, etc.

I actually really dislike when the From field is "John Cooper Smith" and I cannot tell at a glance it's from a specific company... I may want to look, I may not... but having to go in just makes me want to unsub. FTR, I keep and do look at a few of the misc marketing emails a month. Far from all.. and once a quarter I'll spend part of a day specifically unsubscribing.

Interesting insight into the life of a spam writer.

I despise SaaS companies that funnel me into some kind of 30 day email journey when I’m just registering with things my company uses.

It's rather amusing how obvious it is that one of these ever look at their plain-text email, while going to exteme lengths to "style" their email. Also the fact that their "few links" are about 2k chars long each, with CRM tracking whatevers, so one have zero idea what the actual url is.

Keeping chaning your from address is an excelent way to you getting your enire domain spamlisted instead of just the one sender.

> send them to the docs

> But then they’ll get lost

that means your docs are bad

This is a step in the right direction - providing contentful and relevant update emails instead of pure marketing fluff.

The initial intro emails feel a bit unnecessary for me though - sending docs links etc that way just feels redundant, as if I have gotten to that point I've already been skimming your docs.

I'd use a service where I give it a dollar every time I get a marketing email and at the end of the year it makes a top-10-annoyers list and spends the money making life hell for the annoyers.

You don't get heard in HN threads, you get heard by hurting their bottom line.

I'm not sure I understand your scheme. You give it money?

He's paying 1 dollar per email to someone who will annoy spammers.

Right. Like I don't want to jump to conclusions and attack the sender's site just because I got one annoying email. Maybe I'm just having a bad day.

But if we made a list of the worst offenders (based on how many contributions of this sort their email inspired). Well then there'd be a bit more objectivity behind them being truly the worst, and I'd feel a little better about putting on the black hat for them.

I suspect there is a lesson not learned here, which is that asking developers for product reviews can backfire. We're a rather blunt group when it comes to product feedback.

See the other comments here for examples of this reality.

This is easy: have something that is worth reading.

I don't mind email and I have used my technical skills to organize it well, so I can get ten times the efficiency out of it I otherwise would.

The problem is Marketing departments are typically ran by boomers who want these things cranked out. Easy goals for them, they're not graded on the performance past open rates.

Don't just flipping don't. I don't like getting obnoxious emails from people I've never heard of. It pisses me off when I get random emails because you forced me to provide an email address to read your documentation. Here's my advice for email marketing to a developer just flipping don't.

Agreed. "Our spammy emails get low open rates and tons of unsubscribes" should be a signal to stop, not find a way brute force your way into my face.

The obvious corollary is "our spammy emails get good open rates and low unsubscribes" is a signal that we should continue. Do you agree?

That would be a signal that either:

a) it's not spam

b) you are feeding intelligent honeypots

c) you are dreadfully miscalibrated on open rates and unsubscribes

Smart money is on c.

Maybe... A company I used to work at has a really good adjacent network... I had suggested that they put more effort into their industry blog and newsletter instead of some of the other marketing ideas. Both are now a significant portion of their traction and a lot of people are there for the content. Marketing is just a side effect, even if the purpose of the content was marketing in the first place.

I mean, there are ways to do newsletters well. Articles from Tailscale get on HN often for example. I would agree that spammy emails are not helpful though.

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