I work with several clients that between them send roughly 1 million emails per day, every day, and we are small compared to others I know. They fully understand that there are people like most people here that hate email marketing of any kind. But the response rate to those emails is significant.
On an average day they get a 15% open rate. Click rates and purchase rates step down at each stage depending on the purpose of the email, the offer, etc. But that is 150,000 people every day opening at least one email from one of these businesses.
While the 91% stat is probably pure fantasy, the number is far higher than anyone would want to believe. eMail simply works. It is a large and vital part of many businesses.
All of our lists are double opt-in so there is NO WAY you got on it by accident. We also aggressively clean our lists. Don't open an email in 30 days? You get automatically moved to a different funnel. Don't open an email in 90 days? Yet another funnel. 6 months? Off the list entirely. There is an entire process behind this.
We don't want to send emails to people that don't want them any more than you want to get them. Bad lists create delivery issues and get you sent into automated spam filters by providers like GMail. They aren't sent to harass you, they are sent because they work.
Unless they're base64-encoded, images in emails must load off a web server. By customizing the image URLs per recipient, the system serving those images can tell who saw the email.
It's not perfect because:
- Some preview functions load images, even if the email was not actually opened, and
- Some email clients block images from loading by default, so it's possible for the user to open and read the text of the email without triggering an "open" signal.
Clicks are much more reliable signals of intent, but there's far fewer of them.
Don't forget the people that abuse the "mark as spam"-button as unsubscribe link. I saw that beahvior with non-techy users - it's often easier to find than the unsubscribe link and has the same effect to them.
N = 1, but I used to put it in the second sentence of my emails. The unsubscribe rate was still measured in basis points, although I had an unusually high quality list relative to e.g. most e-commerce shops.
i wish devs understood something: whatever pathological behavior you're participating in is just that: pathological. 99.99999999% of people just read emails and do nothing insidious/clever/nefarious. there are literally like 5 people like you and 100,000 people just reading the email and either clicking or not clicking, buying or not buying, etc.
I will attempt to argue against email marketing as a channel for any startup (B2b or B2c).
1. Channel is extremely crowded. Everyone has read the same best-practices and optimization techniques. So emails from most companies (each one of them thinking that they are ‘differentiated) regress in quality and content to a mean.
2. Because it is so measurable (a marketer’s dream), this channel becomes less about what the emails say, but more about tricks to get one to open and click.
3. Excessive click optimization might erode “brand” (my conjecture). Since “brand” falls under the “soft stuff” in marketing, it gets attention as a second class citizen after one has taken care of the measurable stuff. (Defining brand as the ‘impression a word creates in your mind when you hear that word’)
4. Once a startup gives up on the ‘crutch’ of email - may be the team will think anew and innovate. Due to its measurability, my personal opinion is that companies don’t explore other channels - meaning, there isn’t a lot of invention going on.
If one visited a random saas startup and saw a day in the life of their “email marketing team”, I bet they are all roughly doing the same thing and have the same goals. I fear that no one wants to lose out on the 1% out of 1 million attention that emails are able to get - consistently and repeatably - and are thus like a drug that one can’t get off of :-) and thus companies don’t risk inventing new channels.
This is probably an ignorant rant (Eg a good counter argument would simply be - “email is popular because it works!”).
Given the number of emails I get, I do wish more companies tried more creative techniques to grab attention. (The Snapchat vending machine for spectacles comes to mind as a good attempt at innovation. I must confess I have zero knowledge of how the numbers on that approach worked)
In ecommerce, companies like brandless are doing well at getting attention without playing the standard email game (standard email game = ‘buy lists—>optimize—>$’ -> repeat).
Having said this, the advice in this article is very sensible - if someone comes to your site and didn’t complete the purchase, it doesn’t hurt to ask again. I am just raising a caution against taking email marketing for granted - esp if an entrepreneur is just starting out - presumably she can take some risk and try innovative ways of grabbing attention, than just email.
HN folks always hate on email, but compared to other channels (social in particular) the engagement is insane. Insane. 15% quoted by the guy in a thread above for example is unheard of on Twitter/FB.
And compared to paid social/paid search it's SO much cheaper once the list is built.
Please save the "once the list built" <--- see, that's the catch. It's not the catch, it's not that hard to build the list (compared to making paid channels work from an ROI perspective). And in particular for ecommerce (topic of stripe article) just having a simple checkbox for anyone checking out to opt in is more or less free. Mailchimp costs compared to ad costs are also super cheap.
> 91% of customers want to hear from the companies they do business with. It’s unavoidable in the modern e-commerce marketing world.
The quote is referring to email marketing. This seems pretty misleading. I can believe that 91% of people want to hear from some companies. But I'd bet that most people are not interested in hearing from most of the companies they do business with.
There's a simple solution to this. It's called opt-in, and it's not uncommon (although I wish it were ubiquitous). If I check a box (that is by default unchecked) saying I want marketing and promotional emails, by all means send them my way. But I abhor being automatically signed up for emails just by nature of the fact that I made an online purchase.
> But I abhor being automatically signed up for emails just by nature of the fact that I made an online purchase.
Three years ago (before I started an ecommerce store with my girlfriend) I'd have vehemently agreed with you. It took a lot of convincing for me to even consider sending emails to our customers in the early days.
But now I realise that, like with most things in life, aftersales emails aren't inherently bad - most companies just do them poorly. With generic marketing/promotional emails or shudder the dreaded weekly/monthly newsletter...
I would now go as far as to say it's my duty to reach out to customers via email after purchase and ask them whether they are satisfied with the product and if they need any help. The way I see it, if someone has entrusted me with their money, it's my duty to make sure I fulfilled my end of the deal.
In that email, I'll also give my customers a choice of different opt-in options. From "please keep me up to date with any interesting news", through "only email me if there's an amazing deal I really need to know about for {{PRODUCT_CATEGORY}}, to the extreme "I don't wish to receive any further communication via email".
Very, very few people choose the latter - and they are almost exclusively customers who are buying a gift for someone else.
EDIT: If you're downvoting to disagree, please explain why...
I wouldn't have thought I'd ever agree with you, but I recently had exactly that kind of experience. I'd received a product, wasn't entirely happy with it, and if not for a 'are you satisfied?' email I wouldn't have gone through the 'effort' of finding a way to reach the company.
As a result, the issue was promptly resolved and both me and the company are happier.
Sending me more than one email, or automatically subscribing me to some kind of newsletter I find more problematic, though.
Most places are pretty good about sending unsubscribe links these days. However, I ran into a truly awful exception late last year with TaskEasy. For those who don't know, TaskEasy coordinates lawn care and similar services using independent contractors. I was happy with the service I received, and didn't even have to sign up for an account to order it. Then marketing emails started showing up. The unsubscribe link takes you to a login page, but since I never registered this means I have to create an account purely to opt out of spam emails. It's a really dark UI pattern and I'm disappointed in TaskEasy for implementing it.
> Most places are pretty good about sending unsubscribe links these days.
Yeah, but unfortunately companies are also really, really, really good at putting you on mailing lists/ADLs that you never, ever would have signed up for on your own.
I went to a coffee shop in Palo Alto, bought a coffee, paid by Square, found I was now on one of their Square Marketing ADLs. Never asked for it, never would have asked for it, would have said "Hell no" if I were asked. Flagged it as Spam. Seriously considering never visiting that coffee shop again, but have at the very least switched to paying by cash...
Seriously, cut the bullshit. I don't want to be signed up to your list just because I bought something. Ask me if you want me on your list - if it's something I care enough about, I'd actually be okay with it.
As a dev, I implemented something similar. And I can't speak for TaskEasy but mine wasn't on purpose. Really complex process made simple:
1. Start out with an email transaction that follows up purchases done in the MVP to registered users. All that receive the emails have accounts since the MVP required it. It's not hard to setup automatic emails through code... It's hard to think of edge cases though.
2. Change in spec: more people buy if we change the UX and cut the registration.
3. Send an email to the customer. Oops - no account to unregister.
4. (This is the step that was missing) Change the code that handles emails so everyone can unsubscribe.
Sometimes it's important to get something out quick and things aren't always dark UI / UX on purpose. Users are often blaming us devs for our dark evil powers when all we did was shake out some code on a too tight deadline.
Also a dev and I can see how it would happen. Doesn't make it any less maddening though. It's probably more productive to change the culture around email marketing than to scapegoat one company but I needed to vent that frustration.
But we need to understand the regular end user, the average joe, doesn't even know what a spam filter is.
His inbox fills in until he is too afraid to read mails from it, and just looks for emails with particular addresses once a month, then otherwise uses facebook.
Very few click "unsubscribe". Or even notice the checkbox at registration for accepting to received the newsletter.
They use computers very passively. Like an interactive TV with more channels. I've been workon on porn website and video streaming website long enough to learn how little tech saavy the it gets on the other side of the cable.
I've read studies that say that the average user hits spam when the legitimately signed up and just want to unsubscribe. It's easier than clicking the unsub link.
>> come back and visit us in the next 5 days and take 15% off your order
Ugh, I hate this tactic. I understand why it's done - a customer is expensive to acquire, and it's cheaper to give a discount to an inactive customer than to acquire a new one. Yet it effectively rewards non-loyal customers, while loyal customers who provide a steady stream of repeat business are taken for granted. How many businesses who use this strategy also email their best customers with "Thank you for your loyalty - here's 15% off your next order within [some reasonable, non-manipulative, number of days]"?
My other pet peeve is how some marketers use the words “crushing it” in an effort to make me believe something. I must be getting old, because crushing it doesn’t resonate with me.
This is going to get me downvoted, but it needs to be said.
As a marketer, I really wish people behaved logically. If they want to get emails, they opt-in, and they don't want to, they don't opt-in. That's the pervasive belief here based on the comments I've seen so far, and that's really clean right?
However, the truth in my experience is that people don't. This black-and-white segmentation IMHO ignores a middle segment of customers who don't care that much one way or another. They are the ones who don't even see the checkbox, whether it's checked or not, they're just trying to move through a form.
If you don't have opt-in, and when you email them later, some of them do convert. When you move to opt-in, you lose your connection to those customers and your overall re-capture rates go down. You throw the baby out with the bathwater. And the increased engagement from those that are left isn't nearly enough, especially if you have a hard limit on the number of purchases at a time like I did (online financial product).
This is what I know based on the data I've seen in one business. Now if I conjecture, I think opt-in works best for businesses email is your lifeline. Think knowledge-based businesses like I will Teach You to Be Rich - if that guy didn't have email, he'd be screwed. He needs to build trust and he does that through sending you relevant, useful content. So they use opt-in to really make sure their deliverability is top-notch.
Other companies have many channels of acquisition, and send so many emails, that if a few customers click spam, it sucks but it's OK.
So I don't have a great solution. I think the one that works OK is providing prominent unsubscribe options and making it really easy for customers who don't want to receive any more messages to do so. But it's not perfect - we still get spam complaints and people swearing they unsub'd 5 times and still get messages. I don't want to message people who don't want to hear from us, but you need a signal to do so.
> This black-and-white segmentation IMHO ignores a middle segment of customers who don't care that much one way or another.
I think this is very obviously wrong. A middle segment of customers that don't mind getting 47 spam emails per day from dozens of services they've used or businesses they've shopped with in the past (even if it was five years ago and then they just keep getting emails every week forever)? There's no way. Nobody is reading all of that worthless junk. If I didn't aggressively police my inbox from that technically theoretically legally solicited abuse spam, I'd get a thousand plus emails per month of just that. I don't believe for a second that there is anybody on the planet that enjoys that kind of email inbox abuse. Nobody wants to spend their time every day scanning over that and deleting all of it.
I think you and me treat email differently than the average person. I saw my friend's email the other day: 26 thousand unopened emails. And he doesn't mind at all. Sometimes he searches through a few days worth to see if there is anything interesting. I think his use of personal email is much more common than my perfectly organized, and usually 0 unread messages inbox.
Thank you. And yes while 26000 emails would drive me nuts lets not forget there are so many people out there it would not bother that it's actually a big 5 personality trait - conscientiousness. Those who score low or even middle may not police their email or consider inbox zero a worthwhile goal or use of their time.
I personally put in a script that archives all email after 7 days. I figure if I haven't read it in that time period it's not worth while. Keeps my inbox quite small and no policing required :)
I think you need to follow the data and see where it leads you. What happens to your metrics when you implement opt in or double opt in? Not everyone uses or perceives email (or really anything) the same.
Maybe offer them something for opting in? I volunteered for an email list with Travelpro because of the 15% discount. I can't remember another time I've voluntarily subscribed to a company's marketing emails.
My kind of guy right here! I would love to do this. In my industry incentives were kind of challenging to work with (you can get in trouble with regulators for false advertising if you dont dutifully fulfill and audit yourself, discounting the product may be too much risk than business is willing to take on, etc). I will soon be changing industries and can't wait to bring back incentives :)
I generally don't like getting automatic marketing emails, but anecdotes != data, of course. Hacker News readers aren't exactly the general population.
That said, I'm definitely more inclined to engage with properly-personalized emails, even knowing the tactics they employ, because they're usually helpful, or at least have had more forethought put into them.
Heck, even Amazon catches me with a review request from time to time, when I'm keen on venting my spleen.
It works, and in the general case, I definitely prefer it to "no email", because I'd prefer not to miss out on those useful interactions. Even at the cost of having to hit the "unsubscribe" button a few times.
Yes, and the link for that first sentence is a survey which specifically asked about promotions, "e.g., coupons, sales".
That is, what does it take to make a person happy to receive an email from a business? Answer: only the opportunity to spend less money with that business.
It's extremely misleading to try to hijack that statistic into a generic "customers want to hear from companies" claim. Most of this article is about how to get people to spend more money, which is exactly the opposite of what people in this survey indicated.
The quote sounds like wishful thinking to me (reminiscent of drum-beating realtor-speak).
100% of this customer wants to hear from 0% of the companies with whom he does business.
Then there's this common unsubscribe strategy: "Okay, we've unsubscribed you from all messages pertaining to (some narrowly-defined topic)."
Web 2.0 killed popups and unders and overs for the most part, but these sprung back to life once Mom and Pop were told they could make money blogging and pimping other peoples' products (the new Amway or Avon).
Yeah, right. I wonder how they got that number.[1] The people who immediately hang up on robodialers and block phone spam using caller ID probably weren't included in the survey.
Yeah, I want to hear from companies in super limited ways. As an example; Hasbro makes one product I'm interested in (dropmix cards). If I could sign up to a list that sent me an email if (and only if) that product was on sale for 20% or more, I'd be very happy to do that. But I can't, I can only sign up for the mass mailing list. So no thanks Hasbro.
As an aspiring SaaS founder, I was surprised how hard email marketing (EM) is.
My questions so far:
1/ ROI - how much of a difference can good EM make as opposed to bad EM or no EM? Should I not rather focus on improving my product?
2/ What is the low hanging fruit?
3/ What are some of the tools I should be using? If my payment management is in Strip, how do I integrate it with the CRM? [answer: https://stripe.com/works-with/categories/crm]
1) Really dependant on the product/industry, but a bunch of numbers I've seen (and I've been looking into it a lot lately), have claimed from 10-40% trial to paid conversion increase by improving your onboarding emails. (Though the high end has come from also offering things like concierge onboarding to certain amenable customers.)
Improving your product's important, but you have keep in mind that the product is not the business, and a 10% improvement to your product likely won't have anywhere near the effect that a 10% improvement in your marketing will.
2) Sending a single welcome email with first steps that can be used as a reference, sending "trial ending" emails to remind people that their trial as running out (and offering an extension, usually), and 30-90 days after expiry emails offering a trial extension in case they got busy (happens very frequently) or asking for info why they didn't decide to go with your product. Anything above that, you want to start getting into tracking user lifecycle events and customizing your onboarding to that, and in fact, once you start doing that, you can start improving those low-hanging fruit emails as well.
3) You can use something as simple as Mailchimp to something as powerful as Salesforce. It really depends on what part of your funnel you want to focus on.
One thing people don't tend to get about email marketing before diving in is that there's no "one thing" that's email marketing. There's newsletter marketing, where you capture prospects, there's onboarding, there's "regular update" emails, there's winback emails, there's retention emails. Email's just a tool, really, and it's applicable and nearly all levels of marketing.
I've really gotten into this kind of stuff over the past few years, and if you still have questions, I'd be happy to chat with you about it. Email's in my profile.
"What is the low hanging fruit?" --> It's exactly why we're building Highlights (https://www.gethighlights.co/) - to help solopreneurs, entrepreneurs and small businesses automatically find and prioritize their biggest marketing opportunities using the data in their existing marketing tools (Google Analytics, MailChimp).
It's a tedious task that needs regular attention and skills to ensure you're not underperforming, or identify low hanging fruits like old blog posts that are performing well and can be leveraged to get more sales or signups.
The difficulty is that your emailing strategy, the content, etc... change over time. So you don't want to tie it to much with your product code. Decoupled is better. That allows A/B testing without touching your code.
A marketing automation tool allows you to centralize marketing emails as well as transactional emails in one thing, decoupled. Your product emits events with some attributes, and the tool react to it.
Examples with "user_registered" and "user_ordered" events:
- confirmation of order (at "user_ordered")
- ask for a review (at "user_ordered" + 3 days)
- welcome process (drip emails starting at "user_registered")
- wake up campaigns (no "user_ordered" events since 1 month)
- sending a notice for a new product Z to users having bought product X or product Y (segment on users having "user_ordered" for product_id IN (product X id or product Y id))
- ... there is no limit to imagination, I love that!
You should focus on customer acquisition, nurture, retention, and upsell.
Email marketing is just one tool that's used in a specific way depending on your industry, product, and customer base.
Always focus on improving the product, but don't do this in a vacuum. You need to ask customers and potential customers and customers of competitors about their problems.
Email is a great way to scale touch. If you're asking whether you should invest in product or email, you should probably invest in product. Do you know who your ideal customer is? Is the problem your product solves in their top 3 priorities for the year? Are you overwhelmed with order requests / lead inquiries / support requests?
If no to any of the above, then I would just do manual outreach. Get a feel for the customers. Iterate the product. Find product-market fit. At some point you'll naturally wonder if you can scale the successful emails you're sending, and that's when email automation comes into play.
Think of EM as a salesperson. A good one makes a big difference. However, it takes time to develop it into a sales machine. Your best bet at this point is to learn about copywriting basics because that's what EM revolves around.
It's been a while since we've seen you. We know you get busy but we'd love to see you again soon
And I absolutely love spending an hour deleting a flood of auto-genetated e-mails from my inbox every month or hunting for that tiny low saturation "unsubscribe" link (which sometimes doesn't work/exist at all).
The worst offenders are the airlines and travel agencies IMO. I mean I understand getting monthly e-mails from places like amazon where there's a multitude of unrelated things to buy, but how many airplane tickets can I realistically buy?
I think that example is generalized to the point of uselessness.
A really good re-engagement email would hone in on the relationship between you and this company, and offer help in some way. Did you buy a consumable good? Well, maybe you're running out and would like to restock. Did you sign up for a SaaS trial and the trial's nearly over? Here's a step it looks like you had difficulty with, our support number, and maybe a trial extension, so you can really evaluate.
But because the author is trying to write a super general-case email, it actually turns into something you don't want to see in your inbox.
I don't mind getting offers every now and then, but every week or every month is just too much. I understand that companies are flooding their customers in the hopes they get that 1 hit every x e-mails (since sending an e-mail is virtually costless) but it's irritating and it's not worth (for me) the trouble of sieving through the endless stream of useless junk.
If they want me to seriously consider their offer as an existing customer they could send me a personal discount and make me feel I'm worth something. But I rarely get discounts besides the generic ones that apply to everyone (which you can get just by visiting their website even if you've never purchased anything from them before). And the auto-generated "relaxed & casual" language just puts me off, it reeks of kitsch and disrespect.
"generalized to the point of uselessness" is a very apt description
To be fair, living in an European LCC hub I get deals on my inbox every few days and I end up buying plane tickets up to once/twice a month, so it's realistic, maybe not so much for legacy/long haul
I also get many emails from legacy airlines for long haul deals and I end up getting one of them a year, I'd say it's a successful campaign, they don't expect a large amount of customers to jump on every deal, eventually one that's closer to your profile pops up
There's a specific government-controlled list for opting out of credit card offers (task yourself to re-fill it out every 5 years). It really works, I don't get them anymore. I have not tried the permanent opt-out, because maybe in the future I do want offers, so I do the 5 year one.
Yeah.... Mailchimp isn't the best play for e-commerce email marketing for sure. There are better alternatives but I would argue there's a ton of room for improvements as an e-commerce developer...
I'm in the same boat as you. I use a unique email alias for every single sign-up, so I know who sells my email address or sends me marketing cruft accidentally. I'm very aggressive in reporting bad actors to their mail provider if they don't honor or don't have unsubscribe links.
But I think I'm the exception, not the rule, in this case.
Not using aliases I've become very skeptical of unsubscribe links in general, even if they are in emails of "reputable" and established brands, as scammers are now spoofing regular marketing emails like that in the same way they've been doing with PayPal/Battle.net/Banks for years.
Tbh often it does not feel like it's worth the effort, due to the sheer amount of spam you end up getting the older an email address gets, it feels like trying to shovel all the water out of the ocean with a spoon.
Are there any good resources out there as to where and how to report such actors? Does this actually help/change anything? I can't imagine there being much of a shortage of shady mail providers.
The vast, vast majority of spam that I get is from otherwise perfectly reasonable companies who don't understand the law.
To that end, my steps are:
1. Try their unsubscribe, give them a few days for it to "take effect" (which is nonsense, but, so it goes)
2. Send a polite, but direct email to `postmaster@`, and usually cc `webmaster@` - it usually goes to somebody.
3. If none of the above works, pull the full email headers and `dig` around some to find their MX provider, and file a claim with `abuse@` on the provider.
That being said, again usually it's an ignorance problem. I have a friend who helps run a company that does escape rooms, and I had only provided my email on a release form. However a few months later, I started getting marketing spam from them to that email - oops. A lot of small companies don't understand the regs around marketing emails and treat them the same as all other emails.
It's not way off for you, obviously, and based on my experience in email marketing threads, not way off for a lot of the HN crowd.
But the HN crowd is a pretty interesting self-selected group of people. "You're not the target audience," as a fellow website builder used to say. And I think it's true that people who build digital products themselves might not have the same mindset about digital communications as the general public.
And email is funny in my experience... people seem to forget the emails they like to get, and preferentially remember the ones they're annoyed by.
So just out of curiosity I'd ask: do you really receive NO promo emails at all? Absolutely zero? No sales notices from Newegg or other gear sellers? Nothing from any conference you liked or are planning to attend? No airfare sales notices? No "new release" notices for software you like and use? Nothing you've intentionally opted into?
I'll give an example of a good email promo experience--I was looking to fly to New Zealand, but couldn't find a good price. A friend forwarded an sale email from Air Tahiti that had a price about half what I'd seen so far. I bought immediately.
That was a classic good promo email experience--a truly good deal, available to me before it sold out.
At this point I consider my general-purpose email address to be an opt-in advertising receptacle. I don't mind receiving marketing, especially when the coupons are good. However, getting the marketing when I want it for what I want at a particular point in time is tricky. Filtering through the emails becomes tedious, too, as I opt-in to more email lists.
I'd expect it depends on the source - a retailer like Amazon or a local supermarket could well send a daily offer that's interesting/useful. A more niche store might struggle to send something people want to receive even monthly.
>> Once your customer has made that purchase (and you've actually delivered the product) it's time to ask for a review. Of course, you don't want to be the waiter who asks how the food tastes when the diners haven't dug in yet so you'll want to wait until they've had time to use your product.
Pretty useful overview. Have to disagree with the above quote though - if you're running an ecommerce company and have shipped your customer a product, you absolutely don't want to wait before reaching out with a short, friendly, aftersales email asking for feedback and/or a review.
The main reason being that you want to catch any potential problems/unhappy customers early and funnel them into a private feedback channel where you can sort out their problem in private. If you wait three days to ask for feedback from an unhappy customer, that's three days where the customer is potentially writing negative reviews, sharing negative feedback on social media and just telling their friends that your company sucks.
A secondary reason is that people are nearly always most excited by their new purchase when they've just received the package. That's why you're almost 2x as likely to get someone to leave a review/share with friends if you email them on the same day the order arrives vs. a week later.
Lastly, if you're running an ecommerce brand selling physical products, here's a shameless plug for my new tool - www.postperk.com
PostPerk is an aftersales tool for ecommerce to help brands reach more customers. Referral and loyalty programs don't work well for upmarket consumer brands, so we built a tool just for these companies - nudging customers to post on Instagram with tailored rewards. Our first customers are seeing results 2-10x better than comparable tools - increased revenue and repeat customers, fewer negative reviews, and a data-driven community of a brand's most engaged and valuable customers/brand ambassadors.
Happy to chat with anyone thinking about how to improve their aftersales marketing game :)
Love the idea! My only concern would be to ask them in 2 separate emails to post on IG and then post a review for our website, but overall its a great idea. Unfortunately we are still too small to afford that (my website is Cambio & Co.) but hopefully we can one day!
I wish it was opt-in as opposed to opt-out. The amount of email spam and physical spam received is absolutely ridiculous. I shudder to wonder how much electricity is wasted sending unwanted mail and delivering unwanted emails.
Sounds like it'd be a win for everyone based on this guide. Those who want it would opt in, and the company could focus their campaigns for those who want it more. Meanwhile those who don't can be left alone.
It's usually opt-in (if it isn't, a lot of jurisdictions allow you to sue or do other nasty things) but it's ticked by default and somewhat hidden above and below the ToS/EULA.
Checked-by-default means, by definition, it is opt-out as you are opted-in by default. It just has to be possible to opt-out and, if opted-in, unsubscribe at a later date (usually a small, hard to notice link in the legalese of the spam email).
Ah, and not only is it opt-out, you 'opt-in' to at least 5 different email lists all of which you then have to unsubscribe from individually (and if you are lucky the unsubscribe link is present in the mail, and if you are even more lucky it actually works rather than being just another signal to the spammer - sorry, company - that the email address is indeed legit.
And that's before we get into selling your email address to 'partners' who will then really go to town to try to monetize the address.
Email marketing is a rabbit hole, I remember this one particular instance where using a discount to re-engage abandoned carts would trigger a purchase, marking the campaign as a success..only to find out the customers had learned that they could get away with it and abuse this system to get discounts every time. Now that's great, they re buying..but we were in practice losing money on every transaction. That's when we started building better software to block this from happening. Analyzing customer behavior, understanding if a promo was really needed, or if the customers were just waiting for the bait.
Email marketing is hard man, you could always do something more..and drag so many other resources into it!
See - I put stuff in my basket - then keep shopping around, because I need this one thing - but I don't know if I am bothered to receive the item during the week rather than the weekend, or for a million other lazy-me reasons - also I convince myself I get a better deal somewhere else?.. that's why my e-commerce baskets look like abandoned - and then I get hit with discounts and reminders, sometimes you can profit by waiting a day instead of impulse buying things - unless you're running out of toilet-paper or food that is :)
I know this isn't specific to this particular domain, but the thought of psychology being used in a way to essentially herd cattle to consume leaves me feeling a bit cold.
Imagine you have a list of emails from users of your app. You want to send a one-time notification to them. For example, saying that you'll start charging for the app in two months (just an example). How do you proceed? I wish there was an app that would take a list of emails and a Mailgun/etc. API token and send that one-time email to these people.
Well, not hard, I've done that many times, but still, there are thousands of apps out there for making lists and other stupid stuff, and you're not saying this on their threads.
"91% of customers want to hear from the companies they do business with." sounds like a bit of an exaggeration, but I agree - email marketing is still a powerful tool for engaging audiences. Looking forward to seeing how it evolves in the next couple of years.
91% of all statistics in marketing documents are pulled from posteriors. I definitely do not want to 'hear' from the companies I do business with unless I specifically ask for it. No better way to lose me as a customer to pester me with 'opportunities' and 'ways to improve my business' that in fact mean more sales for you.
On an average day they get a 15% open rate. Click rates and purchase rates step down at each stage depending on the purpose of the email, the offer, etc. But that is 150,000 people every day opening at least one email from one of these businesses.
While the 91% stat is probably pure fantasy, the number is far higher than anyone would want to believe. eMail simply works. It is a large and vital part of many businesses.
All of our lists are double opt-in so there is NO WAY you got on it by accident. We also aggressively clean our lists. Don't open an email in 30 days? You get automatically moved to a different funnel. Don't open an email in 90 days? Yet another funnel. 6 months? Off the list entirely. There is an entire process behind this.
We don't want to send emails to people that don't want them any more than you want to get them. Bad lists create delivery issues and get you sent into automated spam filters by providers like GMail. They aren't sent to harass you, they are sent because they work.