Comment by na85 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by na85 | Hacker News Reader

Ugh, I absolutely detest the attitude on display here.. After a user signs up, they get an email? Okay, that's great. Most people expect/want a confirmation. But a few days later? A month later? If they haven't signed in? No, fuck you. Stop spamming me with your stupid Sales Funnel bullshit marketing emails. If your startup requires spamming your users in order to keep them coming back, then guess what? Your product/service isn't good enough.

This article is nothing more than a diatribe by a spammer who's upset that Gmail's new feature makes it harder to get his spam into my inbox.

And let me preempt the CEO of a startup who's sure to reply, telling me that THEIR product is good, and that THEIR users actually want to read the spam. Everyone thinks their special-snowflake emails are the exception, but that's almost universally delusional.

If you're sending more than a single confirmation email that the user has not EXPLICITLY requested then you are part of the problem.

I personally agree with your sentiment, but if it didn't work no one would do it. Obviously there are people out there that do not think like you do. A lot of them.

Why else would a company waste time and money on life cycle emails if they didn't work?

They have a nonzero rate of return. You are hating the player, and not the game. Humans are error prone, forgetful beings. An email reminder can often times engage them into something they intended to do but simply forgot, or became too busy to complete. In this act of reminding there is also a non zero rate of pissing off end users. The advantages obviously outweigh the disadvantages or it wouldn't be done.

I shrug and move on. There will always be an endless cycle of advertising and marketing surrounding you. The entirety of the economy depends upon getting you to exchange currency for productivity.

Just because it works doesn't mean you should do it, or that anyone appreciates it.

The problem is the externalities. It's the same as with spam. Emailing 1000 recipients is free, and there might be 1% that actually appreciates the email. However, there are 990 recipients to whom it is an annoyance. The net effect is that the startup causes more annoyance than value, but it does not need to bear the costs.

Exactly. I read this:

> Today, lifecycle emails are the state-of-the-art in customer engagement. Immediately after a user signs up, they receive an email. A few days after creating an account, they receive another email. A week later, email; then a month later, email; if they haven’t logged in, email.

And thought this article was going to be about how annoying these spammy emails were. Nope, quite the opposite.

But if you don't want to get these can't you just unsubscribe?

Sure, but it's extra effort on your part, and there's no easy way to unsubscribe in advance - after registering for a service, should I go to the settings panel (if it exists), and dig through and make sure that I've unchecked every "hassle me randomly" box?

What I've found is that some companies will invent whole new mailing lists which are opt-out so you get the spam mail and have to log on to the site to unsubscribe. It's like playing Whac-A-Mole but for email.

At first I was a huge proponent of these approaches when they first started because they got me to engage more with services I found valuable, but then it got to the point where it became absurd and lost value for all sites and now I spend time implementing filters, unsubscribing or managing settings upon the first marketing funnel type email, or going back and bulk deleting them after the fact.

The CAN-SPAM act really needs to be updated to take into account a lot of this BS or at the very least some of the mail providers should provide more protection from this. Google has gone a step in the right direction in Gmail.

One rule I would love is that newsletters are legally required to be opt-in, never opt-out or worse yet, no option at all given. Asking users to set their email settings upon signup would be another good one. Forcing companies to add this step to their signup flow would require them to think wisely about how many dozens of types of emails they are going to try to inundate their users with, and only choose those that really matter for the user to get utility from their product/service.

Long term these tactics actually hurt the entire ecosystem because users become wary of the consequences of trying out for a service. TBH I'm getting to the point where I want the signup page to show that they make available a delete account page before I sign up. I don't like the fact that when I stop using a service that my information ends up sitting on their servers for all eternity. It should delete all information within reason and anonymize any information which has been recorded in places where deleting it will degrade the service for other users.

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