[HN Gopher] Email Marketing to Developers
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Email Marketing to Developers
Author : kuba_dmp
Score : 31 points
Date : 2022-12-26 17:43 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ronakganatra.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (ronakganatra.com)
| Animats wrote:
| 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.
| mway wrote:
| 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.
| slang800 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| 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.
| firstSpeaker wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| cuu508 wrote:
| 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.
| pc86 wrote:
| 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.
| tracker1 wrote:
| 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.
| snickerer wrote:
| 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.
| steele wrote:
| Many devs disable images, especially to professional accounts
| precisely to avoid tracking pixels, phishing, etc.
| [deleted]
| agluszak wrote:
| > 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?
| kneebonian wrote:
| 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.
| ROFISH wrote:
| 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.
| kqr wrote:
| The obvious corollary is "our spammy emails get good open
| rates and low unsubscribes" is a signal that we should
| continue. Do you agree?
| j5155 wrote:
| 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.
| tracker1 wrote:
| 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.
| dsr_ wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| monero-xmr wrote:
| 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!
| notshift wrote:
| 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.
| bubblematrix wrote:
| 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.
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(page generated 2022-12-26 23:01 UTC)