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Comment by remram | Hacker News Reader

This is extremely on topic. If a company thinks "marketing email open rate" is a target, it has lost track of what marketing is.

The point is to drive business to the company and that is what should be measured. If people click on your email but don't do any purchase they were already about to make, they are useless. If your spam also alienate your customers, stop what you're doing, no matter your open rate!

I don't understand how so many companies let their marketing department get away with this.

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'I don't understand how so many companies let their marketing department get away with this.'

Probably because their marketing people are highly skilled at marketing themselves.

It surely couldn't have anything to do with non-marketers overestimating their knowledge of marketing.

You wouldn't trust a marketer to give input on the job of computer programming. Why would you trust a programmer to give input on the job of marketing?

or... because marketing works.

Something folks here are rare to ever admit. HN is populated with amazing people who see thru all facades and are completely incapable of ever being a 'victim' of advertising, because we all know better!

Indeed it does, I'm not sure that means we shouldn't criticize some of the most annoying aspects of it though?

Marketing working is exactly what makes it unethical.

It definitely has an impact in general, that doesn't mean that every marketing campaign has a positive impact on their company. Though of course if you only ask the marketing department whether they are efficient, they are going to always say yes.

The first time you personally get an effective marketing email it all starts to click - I suspect that you and I have had similar experiences in that we arent really the demographic those emails are trying to reach and that we only bought a product as the most expedient way to fill a need. Thus all further communication becomes an irritant.

But for me the aha moment was getting an email from a restaurant supply store where I was genuinely interested in the range of goods they were advertising (hell yes I would like more information on a cotton candy machine!).

The point here being that your own personal interaction with it might not generalize well - it alienates you, but maybe you arent really their customer anyway? Their might well be people that appreciate those emails.

I am not saying that no marketing campaign works, I am saying that not all of it is effective, and that companies should be at least interested in finding out whether their own marketing department is helping the business.

I don't understand how anyone takes "email click rate is high" as a definite signal that the whole effort is beneficial and worth the money.

This is similar to hiring a cloud team and getting reports that "CPU utilization is high" across the VMs. Of course using the cloud makes sense for a variety of companies, but if this is the only metric you use to know whether your cloud team is beneficial to the business, you really have no idea.

Ah, I see. I thought you had trouble seeing why some one would do that at all, which is how I previously felt.

It really seems like a traditional case of "bit shit at your job huh?". Like, they are trying to do the efficacious thing, just failing.

100%! I open every marketing email I receive, to hit unsubscribe...

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