Comment by cessor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cessor | Hacker News Reader

I believe I had mentioned this before - and received a lot of downvotes for it: I, as a user, wish not to be bothered with emails.

I often just briefly want to see what the fuzz is all about. The app then "tricks me" into providing them with an email address, by pretending they need this as an identifier, most of the time in order to create an account. They then feel free to send me "Greg from blahblah app"-Emails.

To me, this is spam. It is an email I do not want. To me there is no difference between a random spammer who wants to sell fake viagra and Greg from blahblah app, who wants me to use his cloud-driven javascript thingy.

I believe there is a role missing, in the view on customer relationships. Just because I am looking at things in your store doesn't mean I want to be treated as a customer already. I believe there should be a differentiation between somebody who already bought something and somebody who is about to. Aggressively sending email at any chance isn't the way to make this transformation, imho.

So, focusing strictly on the business side of things, you have two user groups:

1) Users who have some interest and may purchase your product.

2) Users who "just briefly want to see what all the fuzz is all about" but "don't want to be treated as a customer already."

User group 1 may very well respond to your emails because they already have some interest in your product and the benefit it could provide them. These users like to read about ways to help themselves, thus probably don't consider email related to the product they are interested in as spam.

User group 2 is not interested in the product. We know that. Therefore few, if any, are ever going to pay you for it.

So, why as a business owner, would you care about annoying people in User group 2 (who could always just opt-out of the emails) at the expense of accelerating people in User group 1 through the funnel and paying you more?

On the other hand, group 2 are the ones who you need to really convince. Group 1 is already convinced. So if you spam group 2, you might lose them completely and group 1 you don't really need to spam.

No, Group 1 describes users who are interested in your product but, for whatever reason, have not yet made the purchase. Maybe they're on the fence about whether they need it, or are deciding between two or three products. The purpose of the emails is to help tilt them over to making the decision to go ahead with the purchase.

Users in group 2 are never going to be interested enough to purchase the product. No email will convince them to. That's why whether you "spam" them or not (I would argue that it is not spam if you gave the site your email address with the understanding you may get emails from them) they are not going to purchase your product, so what difference does it make if they are annoyed by the emails?

Hi there, I helped put this guide together and this is totally something we have in mind pretty much all the time (when you tell people you work for an email startup, you're kind of forced to.) But this is actually the kind of email we're trying to prevent. I usually refer to it as "The Other Spam."

I've had multiple users of ours talk about how they tried starting newsletters to resurrect dropped users but got more unsubs/spam reports than renewals. Some even got hit up by their ESPs for a spike in spam reports affecting their domain credibility. There should probably be a more prominent section on this, but we do talk about it in our blog a lot.

Here's what I usually say:

1) Always have a separate opt-in for product updates, off by default, ideally with some sense of frequency. Failing that, send product updates only to paying/active customers.

2) If you have an onboarding drip campaign, once it runs its course, if they haven't engaged, let them go.

3) From there on, all other communications should pretty much be transactional, sent to the opt-in group, or based on some pre-qualification that the user is still interested.

These are all things that we try and make really simple in our product and exercise ourselves. Part of sending better email is just not sending the shitty ones.

On the personal side, I also just add tags to my email address when I sign up for something knowing that I'm just poking around so I can easily filter their follow-ups. I also appreciate this from a lead validation angle, because I can filter email addys with a + in them from our funnel metrics.

This is a fine line to walk indeed: you don't want to spam the user, but you also want to stay "top of mind" in the prospect mind.

I think most of app founders view this under the lens of "how can we get this user to use our app?" which I think is a wrong approach.

To me the right approach as always is to start from the user, and not to see yourself (the app maker) as just this app provider. Instead, see yourself as a business coach and help the user solving the business problem (that your product solves).

Brennan Dunn's app (planscope.io) does this quite well. He doesn't just tell you to use his app, by he actively tries to educate you on how to win proposals (and his app is project management app).

Your end goals as a business app provider should be to solve for your customer success. By solving for customer success, you will solve for your product long term success. And this should drive every decision in the business.

So when you think about that email that you send, ask yourself "is this contributing to our customer success? or is it just spamming this user who might need something else at this moment?"

I know this does not help your point for the companies side, but I usually use temporary email adresses (such as http://10minutemail.com/) to avoid that problem.

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