16 ms·

Marketing automation is getting out-of-hand

182 points by adriand 10y ago

sharemywin 10y ago
Unless there is something personal in them I ignore them after the first line or two.
anigbrowl 10y ago
This post describes how I've felt for many years. Marketing is an important function of business - otherwise one could easily go broke waiting for people discover on their own what great goods or services a business has to offer. In a busy marketplace, getting and keeping buyers' attention is a necessary first step to developing a business relationship. But a lot of marketing people seem to think that the best way to do this is to annoy potential or existing customers, so that their employer's brand will always come to mind first, even if it is tainted with somewhat negative feelings about the product. In one way, I don't blame them - that technique is empirically proven to work, marketing people want to meet their targets, get paid, and go home like everyone else does, and the uncertain nature of business communication makes it difficult to adjust to the information preferences of each individual consumer. But in another way, I do blame them, for two reasons. One, because they are deliberately choosing to clutter up people's lives with unwanted solicitations of attention, often despite specifically being asked not to. One thing I really miss about living in the Netherlands is that the post office there gives you stickers you can put on your mail box/slot to indicate whether you are willing to accept different kinds of commercial mail, both generic and personal. Two, because a great deal of marketing material goes beyond a solicitation and description of goods and services and into bullshit and deception. Almost every marketing professional I've ever met seems to think that some dishonesty in commercial matters is OK. It's understandable, as they're partly backed by a legal system that historically regards many false claims in advertising as 'mere puffery' - essentially saying that because consumers are exposed to a lot of bullshit anyway, it's OK to bullshit them. I disagree, and the greater the degree of bullshit I receive from any given business, the more likely I am to retaliate against them in some fashion, by adding them to spam lists, badmouthing them within my social circle, or occasionally responding with bullshit communications of my own designed to waste their time - followed up with helpful comparisons to their own marketing materials so they understand that deception doesn't pay.
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  Why Advertising is So Annoying - School of Life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5JdX_iQ2Hk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5JdX_iQ2Hk
- desireco42 10y ago
  Unfortunately most of annoying marketing actually is producing results, which is why people are using it. But I am with you in that, that for all the money marketing people are getting, they could be more creative how to get our attention and how to reach us. Most of them just repeat over and over same old stuff, whether it is direct mail, spamming your inbox or retargeting.
  - anigbrowl 10y ago
    Oh I don't want them to be more creative. At least the more predictable they are the easier I can filter their bullshit out. What I really hate is the arms race for attention. For example I got really annoyed some years ago when fonts got good enough that marketing people started sending out mail that to a casual glance looked to have a hand-written address - naturally people are more inclined to open a hand-written letter first since it appears to be a personal rather that commercial communication. Then a year or two back someone tried to launch a startup here - without much success, thank heavens - that paid people (poorly) to actually write out addresses and even letters by hand, so that people could receive 'genuine' hand-written mail from businesses they were dealing with, which would appear to be a personal thank-you note from the CEO or whatever. Happily most other HN readers were similarly dismayed and the founder was excoriated, though I'm sure the business lives on and is probably profitable given the economic incentives. Living in the US, I really don't think that full first amendment protections should extend to corporations or commercial speech. Sure, corporations are legal persons (for some very valid reasons), but that personhood should be severely limited - after all, we wouldn't allow corporations to start launching artillery shells at each other on the theory that they deserved second amendment rights (in the USA obviously). I don't favor pre-emptive censorship, but I do favor the idea that deceptive commercial speech should expose the dishonest speaker to severe civil damages as punishment for seeking to exploit public trust mechanisms for private asymmetrical gain.
excalibur 10y ago
All automation is out-of-hand by definition.
kurthr 10y ago
I wish they would stop calling this Marketing, and call it Advertising or Sales... or just call it Spam. Yes, I know that Push Marketing and Marketing Automation is a thing and that they probably originally chose the words because they didn't have such a negative connotation (that's good marketing!), but what does this really have to do with a market? I am not a market... just an unwilling product being packaged and sold.
JeremyMorgan 10y ago
The biggest issue with this for me is the signal to noise ratio is getting too hard to determine. I don't want to ignore a real human reaching out to me for something, but I often do. And for recruiting purposes it's really bad (I'm sure many of you face this). I don't want to just ignore a true recruiter who would like to talk to me about a position, but answering every single spammed out email is out of the question.
soared 10y ago
These emails are only a touch worse than corporate blogs that look like personal blogs. If this was on a personal blog it would be genuine, but finishing this post only to see a call to action and marketing speak at the bottom really counters his point.
dkarapetyan 10y ago
Soon automated marketing will be getting responses from customer proxies and we will achieve the singularity. On a more serious note I think the article points out something that automation erases. This person wants a genuine interaction instead of a simulacrum of a human interaction. Hamming has a great lecture series where he consistently re-iterates the point of human/machine interactions as a symbiotic relationship where the machines augment and enhance human qualities instead of just substituting for them. Norbert Weiner before him says the same things at the dawn of cybernetics and information theory. There is much potential in these machine enhanced systems but it seems like it is all being squandered.
legitster 10y ago
I'm actually a Marketing Automation Specialist, and I would like to clear up that this is not marketing automation. These are just canned emails. The fact that they use email automation systems for them is silly as I can pretty much do the same thing with an Excel spreadsheet and a mail merge. Usually these emails are the result a sales-focused organization being oversold on a marketing platform and trying to put it to good use the only way they know how: buying lists and sending them unsolicited emails. But marketing automation in general is much more all-encompassing and you shouldn't necessarily mind it when done well. More and more it doesn't even involve email.
- CrackpotGonzo 10y ago
  What are you currently working on? Always curious about fellow marketing automation people.
  - legitster 10y ago
    Experimenting with creating a very rudimentary internal API to handle some unique lead processing. Also, web personalization, but we are not very happy with the product we are using and are trying to work out some kinks.
    - maxerickson 10y ago
      Do you foresee identifying people who hate targeted advertising and pulling back the amount of messaging they get? It actually seems to be the case already, but I dream of the day where the facial recognition system in the store turns on a little red light on the cash register, notifying the cashier that I'm going to respond negatively.
      - legitster 10y ago
        We kind of do that already. We identify user groups that have low response rates and cull them automatically, or put them on a lower frequency program. Good, quality leads are expensive and you don't want to completely burn them out. We also have built-in stopgaps that limit the amount of emails people get. Nobody gets more than x per unit of time, the ratio of which we are always trying to push down.
Animats 10y ago
SpamAssassin is discarding almost all of those for me. I just looked in the reject folder, and there are hundreds of such messages, all rejected. If you're seeing those, your spam filtering is inadequate. Are those getting through Gmail's filters? If they are, Google is slipping.
- yborg 10y ago
  >Google is slipping Or maybe Google is monetizing. Trusting an advertising company to not forward you advertising is somewhat naive.
  - Animats 10y ago
    Google apparently does now have a whitelisting program for bulk senders. AcceptEmail claims to be whitelisted.[1] [1] https://www.acceptemail.com/us/blog/acceptemail-authorized-by-google-for-use-of-action-buttons https://www.acceptemail.com/us/blog/acceptemail-authorized-b...
uptown 10y ago
Anyone have success with Unroll.me? Wish there was a way to use it without handing over access to my email account.
- e1g 10y ago
  I used unroll.me several times, and every time it helped to reduce the inbound end of the email funnel. Because of privacy concerns, now I just search for "unsubscribe", and go through the process manually - this catches >90% of automated emails and takes 2 minutes to clean up the inbox.
Spooky23 10y ago
Marketing is always a pain in the ass. One persistent Salesdude actually figured out where I ate breakfast and showed up there to run into me once. The email version is easier to deal with. It's moderately annoying,but really no big deal.
- Gustomaximus 10y ago
  Marketing <> Sales It's kinda like a designer and developer. People who only see IT work from a distance may feel they are 'people who make websites' but there is a entirely different skillset and method difference, but there can be some crossover and they combine well together.
  - Spooky23 10y ago
    As a target of a lot of both marketing and sales, from my pov they are merging. These super targeted email and phone campaigns are more like a sales process. Marketing traditionally was about educating with propaganda and matching problem with solution for lead generation. Now there's more attempts to actually sell! On the sales side, the old school salespeople who were really there to build relationships and solve problems are a dying breed. Modern salespeople are hamsters on some micromanaged CRM wheel, even from big companies.
    - davidivadavid 10y ago
      Direct marketing isn't exactly new. Whether your consider it marketing or sales is kind of an academic debate, but that overlap has always existed (how could it not?).
Terretta 10y ago
It's not "getting" out of hand. This exact mass personalized campaign style has been around since before the Internet. I managed IT at a printing press where we used letterpress printing on cotton rag paper to "type" "personal" letters to lists of a million people. We "signed" the letters in different ink. We paid extra for first class stamps instead of postage meter. And, we would send up to five letters in a series each referring to the one before, and by the last letter, we printed yellow highlighter over key sell phrases and 'wrote' in the margins with different colored ink to say this is the stuff that really matters to you. These campaigns were deadly effective.
- Swizec 10y ago
  Sounds like drip campaigns on steroids. Know any tips for how to learn more about this? I've found drip campaigns very converty, but I'm still a total newb.
  - chinathrow 10y ago
    Drip campaigns sound like spam to me. That is, from an european perspective.
    - devoply 10y ago
      Not really spam. The person you are e-mailing is using your product. So it's about connecting with that person and helping them use your product to such an extent that they stick around and pay for your product. It would be great if you could give your personal attention to each and every customer, but you can't.
      - tomc1985 10y ago
        It's way too easy to sign up for 10 different services and receive 10 different "personalized" e-mails, when you just wanted to be left alone and check things out. Most of the time if money is going to change hands I want a simple transaction, without additional humans sticking their grubby hands in and complicating things. High-touch sales does that.
cmac2992 10y ago
I think you'd be surprised to hear that a lot of these emails aren't automated. Templatized definitely. automated, maybe. Fortune 500 companies employee fleets of just out of college marketing majors to do just this sort of thing.
davidgerard 10y ago
How can we impose an automated, scalable cost on this sort of marketing? Or, calling it what it is, spam.
- anchpop 10y ago
  Someone had the idea that the one sending the emails should be the one hosting them, not the one receiving them. The cost would be insignificant for most people but people who send a huge amount of emails would have to pay significantly more than they do today
  - greenshackle2 10y ago
    Another idea is proof-of-work systems - the sender has to prove that they've performed some work. hashcash is an example, where to sender has to compute a hash with certain properties, and use is as a 'stamp'. You'd need a whitelist system along with it, else legitimate lists with large subscription bases would get hit hard.
  - rogerbinns 10y ago
    While sounding good in theory, it changes a dynamic in practise. In particular reading a mail would now require connecting to the sender's systems in order to get the message. That would then give them read confirmation, confirmation that your address is valid, location information (geoip etc) and an opportunity to deliver different content when you request the message versus the stub that was sent announcing it. As is usual with these kind of proposals, you'll find it ticks many items on the checklist: https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt
- Gustomaximus 10y ago
  I've always thought it would be good to setup a LinkedIn type platform that let's the user 1) put a white list of contacts or 2) A price to contact. If your not on the whitelist any contact gets a response of "please pay X" for emails to get through. People can place their own value on their time and advertisers can decide if this is worth it. Also you could add a call feature where if a recruiter/sales person wants to schedule a call they can (via forwarded number to keep anonymity) at the agreed rate.
20years 10y ago
I think good marketing automation is very specific to the phase the user is in and doesn't even always involve email. For example, if a user signed up to your SaaS and started the process but didn't finish, an email guiding them how to finish or asking if they need help in that step can be helpful. Or if a shopper added a product to their cart but didn't check out, a remarketing ad showcasing that product with a promo may remind and entice them. So many are just pushing out generic mass emails every 3 days and calling it marketing automation. That is not marketing automation, that is spam.
- username223 10y ago
  > a remarketing ad showcasing that product with a promo may remind and entice them. Is there a part of you that is still human? If your "user" didn't buy the thing, that may be because that human decided he didn't want it. Pestering him ("reminding" or "enticing") may shove him farther down your sales funnel, but don't pretend it's anything but hostile.
  - gk1 10y ago
    "Hostile" is taking it a bit far. If the "reminder" ad wasn't there, then you would just be seeing some other (less relevant) ad.
    - username223 10y ago
      No, I wouldn't -- blocking web spam is pretty easy, and I crack down hard on companies that send me email spam (your "reminders," and everything else from your domain, go straight to the trash). If I have decided that I don't want to buy your thing, you should respect my decision.
      - 20years 10y ago
        I think you may only be seeing things from your own point of view. The % of people that click and complete purchases from these re-marketing ads when they are done correctly is huge. Oftentimes in the 80% range when done correctly. When someone places something in a shopping cart but then leaves without finishing the purchase, that shows intent. There are a lot of things that could have interrupted that purchase. Reminding them about it and even offering a % off promo is very effective and many people appreciate it. Yeah when done poorly, it can be ineffective and overbearing but I think that is the case with a lot of things that are done poorly.
ardeay 10y ago
Here is a pull quote from an article that published today "As People Get Weary of Sales Automation, Direct Sales Contacts Prevail The email automation era is becoming very easy to spot, and it’s happening everywhere. Multiple emails like this land in our inboxes on a daily basis. This robotic tactic may even begin to harm a brand’s reputation. Sales people will go back to being people and will personalize an email or pick up the damn phone. The excitement of automation in the digital era will also make people realize that they like to talk to people" http://www.cmswire.com/digital-marketing/marketing-trends-shaping-the-year-to-come/ http://www.cmswire.com/digital-marketing/marketing-trends-sh... Seemed relevant ;)
- double0jimb0 10y ago
  Content marketing, yay!
  - ardeay 10y ago
    srs :)
- jodrellblank 10y ago
  With 1 you and millions of companies, how long before your phone is continuously ringing with direct sales contacts?
jerkstate 10y ago
My wife got one of these ads from a car dealership. It was made to look like an Outlook email printout from a sales rep at another dealership addressed to the guy who had sold her car to her. The email stated that the dealership had an interested buyer for that particular model year (about 5 years old) and that hers was the only one in the area. They said that if she came in, they would give her a free oil change and offer her above market rates for a trade in. The printout had what looked like a hand-written post-it stuck to it asking her to get ahold of the sales rep in question. I was suspicious but she followed up and found that the sales rep who had supposedly sent the email was not even a real person. It was a pretty advanced scheme to try to cover up the fact that it was just a way to get her into the shop, inspect her car, and find all sorts of problems with it and pressure her into trading it in. Probably the scummiest thing I've seen in a long time.
- zippergz 10y ago
  For every car I've bought in the past 15 years, at some point I've received a letter from the dealership telling me that my car is in "high demand" and that they'd pay me a premium price to buy it from me (of course with the expectation that I'll buy a new car from them, and the "premium" price probably isn't). I've never received one this sleazy, but unfortunately it seems to be pretty standard practice.
  - sgs1370 10y ago
    I've only bought 4 cars, and this last one has had much worse spam, some via mail but so much more via phone (3-4 per week, warranty and sales), to the point where the next time I buy (if ever) I will use a burner phone #.
    - wcummings 10y ago
      >only bought 4 cars Since when is 4 cars not a lot of cars?
    - lisivka 10y ago
      Pickup the phone then mute it and wait until caller will drop the call. Works fine for me.
zeveb 10y ago
For some reason the entire article consists of lines collapsed on top of one another. Very odd.
colinbartlett 10y ago
I get so many of these, that upon receiving the first one, I just immediately setup a filter to move everything from that sender into the Trash. They never have an "unsubscribe" and they are always followed by a series of ever more desperate messages, so that's really the only way to keep them out of my inbox.
username223 10y ago
> Here's an example from LinkedIn. This is the fifth email I have received from this "person". If you still receive any email from @linkedin.com, you need to fix your spam filter so that no longer happens.
noahmbarr 10y ago
(full disclosure we, and most scaled Enterprise SaaS organizations, use these tools) This is probably NOT marketing automation (Marketo, Eloqua, or HubSpot) you're coming up against, it's a new class of tools that run "playbooks" via moderately sophisticated mail merged email campaigns. It's an effort to automate and/or optimize what junior sales staff (often called Sales or Business Development Representatives) do. Some of those tools include Outreach.io, Salesloft, and Toutapp. It could also be a home brewed app firing these emails. These are designed to seem like a person wrote those emails to you, but really they are running on a schedule and logic, listening for pixel loads, link clicks, and/or your response. If you don't respond, they can respond to themselves after X business days/hours, etc. They are being optimized for conversion, and some even have A/B testing built in. Coupled with outsourced labor or scrapers focused on picking up on signals and populating a specific field to be mail merged (in OP's case, a title from a job posting), some of these things literally run themselves. Generally, you get a human when you respond back -- as the algorithms aren't smart enough [yet] to respond back appropriately. Hope this clears it up. I hate being on the other side of these things too. If you get one and want it to stop, either click the CAN-SPAM opt out or briskly respond accordingly.
- peteretep 10y ago
  That surprised me about the article: I regularly see stuff like this from recruiters but there's almost always a give-away unsubscribe link.
- justzisguyuknow 10y ago
  I work for a sales team that uses one of these tools. I think one part of the picture that you've left out is that (at least in our case, and I suspect in many other companies) it's actually the junior sales reps (SDR/BDR/etc) themselves who are using the tool to scale their own prospecting communication. So I don't think it's necessarily quite as malicious as OP believes; these are emails that the rep would be sending personally, but the tool allows them to automate parts of the process and scale up their volume by an order of magnitude. Much of a BDR's job is to find an email template that works for a certain type of prospect, and then to find as many of that type of prospect as possible and send them that email. You can expand this to a 'cadence' of emails. But whether or not they are automating their work with this kind of tool, the prospect's experience wouldn't change much. Edit: I should also add that (again – in our case) we push our BDRs to send one-off, personalized emails and get on the phone as much as possible. They're ultimately judged by the amount of business they generate, not how many prospects they blast emails to.
WhitneyLand 10y ago
Many of these do not have a CANSPAM unsubscribe, as the author pointed out. How is this legal and not a violation of CANSPAM?
- beejiu 10y ago
  If it is anything like the law in the UK, there is probably an exemption for B2B business communications. (I.e. the law protects consumers not businesses.)
barrkel 10y ago
Who replies to unsolicited marketing email even if it's from real people and not templates? If we rewarded that behaviour, everybody would do it - and it would destroy email's utility. So I ignore them one and all.
- arkitaip 10y ago
  Don't just ignore, mark them as spam, especially if you're using Gmail or another big email provider as this will train their spam filters.
pascalxus 10y ago
Don't hate on the email outreach because it's automated. If your going to hate it, do so for sincere reasons: namely that you're not interested in their services. And, if you are interested and you reply, then you should be grateful they reached out to you. I wouldn't mind an automated message if they had something I really really wanted. The problem is, 99.9999% of the time, automated message or non-automated messages aren't offering me anything I actually want. Case in point: if an automated message offered you a mansion in your neighborhood for sale, at 200$, would you really be upset that the message was automated?
- MaulingMonkey 10y ago
  > Don't hate on the email outreach because it's automated. If your going to hate it, do so for sincere reasons: namely that you're not interested in their services. I get emails from services that I'm actively trialing and evaluating to see how effectively it meets my needs. That's how they got my email address in the first place. I'm interested as hell in their services. I may have already bought their services. I have exactly zero interest in being interrupted and distracted by an ad copy regurgitating the same basic information I already looked at on their fucking website - or worse, sharing information they hid from their website. I cannot hit unsubscribe fast enough. If it wasn't worth writing, it certainly wasn't worth sending! > Case in point: if an automated message offered you a mansion in your neighborhood for sale, at 200$, would you really be upset that the message was automated? I would be upset that they've clearly sold my email address to a third party - or worse, have some kind of advertisement XSS stealing login emails - spamming me clear scams, email their security alias to notify them assuming the worst, make my spam filters more aggressive, and second guess if I really want to entrust their services with any of my data. Even if, somehow, against all odds, you could convince me it was a 'legitimate' offer, I'd assume the automation was bugged and the offer would fall through, or that the property had some kind of significant issue - huge tax burden, implied responsibility for superfund site cleanup, onerous historical upkeep and maintenance requirements, etc. that would make me uninterested in the actual deal. You could convince my closest confidants to take up the deal, a perfectly legitimate offer with no such hidden issues or strings, honor it, and on my death bed I'd be wondering when the other shoe was going to drop on them, upset that they'd been conned. If I want a $200 mansion, I'll go out and find it, if it exists. Don't call me - and most especially do not call me with a python script pretending to be a real boy engaging in a real one on one conversation when it isn't - I'll call you.
revicon 10y ago
Do your part and mark these as spam. If enough of us do it, the emails will stop, either because they're in spam now or the marketers learn better.
Florin_Andrei 10y ago
> They try to play on the recipient's sense of courtesy. They look like an actual email, and it really feels rude not to reply. Nope. Not anymore. That used to be the case, I don't know, 10 years ago? But in these days of the spampocalypse, not replying to emails feels about as rude as stepping on ants on the sidewalk. Sorry, but my time is literally the only non-renewable resource I have.
- StanislavPetrov 10y ago
  Sending an unsolicited email solicitation is rude. Refusing to reply to an unsolicited email is not rude.
  - ommunist 10y ago
    Thing is, the guy signed into LinkedIN ToS, opening himself for this vector of attack, ehm... voluntarily.
rf1331 10y ago
The emails work, it's how business gets done. Live with it or don't use email.
SixSigma 10y ago
This reminds me of a personal experience. I used to work for a programming startup, we all worked from home and logged into an IRC channel to communicate. People would come and go and you;d have the rounds of "hello", "good morning", "how are you today" etc. so I wrote an IRC hello_bot to do it for me, made a list of my typical greetings and that all was good. It only ran when I was logged in so if more interaction was required, I was on hand. Eventually our Sales Manager worked out it was a bot and got really angry, while the tech people (everyone but him) thought it was a cool and fun thing. He didn't appreciate that my bot to say hello to him probably took me more effort to get right than I ever put into actually saying hello. It was a good lesson to me. (later we found he had been skimming money off the top of contracts, rippig us off for thousands and the company ceased trading, I'm not sure if that's related :)
kilroy123 10y ago
I have a simple solution for this. I create a gmail filter that looks for the word "Unsubscribe" in it. If so, it skips my inbox, and is in a special folder. My inbox is a real inbox with emails that are real.
- al_chemist 10y ago
  You may want to reread the article. It's about messages without "Unsubscribe" link.
kazagistar 10y ago
Welcome to the zero sum endgame of the global economy. As real innovation slows, markets become a zero sum game, with everyone competing to push their "differentiated" brand on a finite consumer base. If improving your products is too hard, all you have to do is spend more on tricking the consumers into buying it. Except once everyone figures it out, the war escalates, getting more scummy and deceptive with each iteration. At least it means we won't run out of jobs for people; once there is no more engineering to be done, everyone will eventually work in some outlet of sales and marketing.
andrewfromx 10y ago
has the author watched HBO Westworld? Aren't we learning that a bot and a human BOTH have feelings. "People are designing their email automation templates to play on the sense of obligation and even guilt of their recipients, even though no obligation or guilt should be felt, since you're not getting emails from a human being, you're getting emails from a bot." This is so anti bot! no obligation or guilt should be felt is exactly what the evil do-ers in Westworld do to hosts.
banku_brougham 10y ago
Nobody has mentioned the movie 'Her' yet, so I will. Don't get caught up in being personally offended, I say imagine the evolution that leads to the point where you not only feel that initial warm acceptance of personal interest, but continues as you go deeper and receive recognition, understanding, even love.
ommunist 10y ago
In response for protection of automated marketing emails, can you think about such a bot as an extension of account holder persona? Many know how polite and honest are talent seekers from recruiting business, so does their bots. If we expose ourselves in social networks, we are automatically becoming targets for aggressive manipulation, nothing strange. FB, LinkedIN, they never considered you and I personas. We are goods, that has to be handled, resold and generating profits. Psychology behind modern recruiting business does not differ much from that of slave acquisition. And there is nothing wrong with it. Except one thing. Abolitionists could have saved you from slavery, but no one can save you from automated marketing unless you delete yourself from the Internet.
snotrockets 10y ago
I've made a very simple software that tags such emails, and generates an automated reply back. From the response I get, I suspect the marketers don't realize I'm using tools similar to theirs.
- dilemma 10y ago
  Hilarious. I think there's a market for your product.
- siddharthdeswal 10y ago
  Where can we try it out?
tomcam 10y ago
I am a polite person but I decided years ago to ignore these. My reasoning is that if it's truly urgent they will figure out how to get through the email noise, and if it's a friend they can just text or tweet or call me. I sleep fine at night.
Negative1 10y ago
Very much agree. I get a ton of these personalized emails that go something like "Hey it's Joe from Startup A, thanks for using our product. Reach out and provide some feedback...". My first instinct is to reply back, thinking this is a real human attempting to connect. Then I realize it's a con. It's sad but I'm much less trustful now when I receive an email from someone I don't know. It just shouldn't be that way but these lazy marketers are preying on human generosity and decency and when you discover this it just leaves the worst taste in your mouth.
kumarski 10y ago
I don't think so. Companies often die because they don't send enough emails, not the other way around. Fallibility is your own worst enemy in a startup, and email outbound is one way to kill it faster. That being said, there should only be one follow up. There's only 2 reasons that have high response rates for messaging people outbound. 1. They want to make you famous and build a relationship with you. In which case you should respond. I always advise this as the best method for building customer relationships. Just setup a blog and reach out to them asking to interview them about what they do. Only after the outbound company knows the candidate, should they discuss the mechanics of their businesses and if they can help eachother. 2. If there's deep timing context. (Saw you just raised, saw you in the press, etc...) 3. (This one is really tough, but if you're very high profile, you can just reach out.) Everything else is likely low response/open rate.
settsu 10y ago
The author's own website uses automated "chat" that appears to be initiated by a real person.
prawn 10y ago
I receive loads of these sorts of emails, but one recent one stood out. They had a script that looked up my location, automatically found a restaurant nearby and randomly picked a dish from the menu. The email then attempted to make small-talk about how this individual had once dined at said restaurant and enjoyed said dish. And it might've been remotely convincing had they not used such halting language and brackets around the inserts implying they were variables in a script. There's automating general messaging, and then there's automating "personalised" smalltalk.

182 points by adriand 10y ago

Unless there is something personal in them I ignore them after the first line or two.

This post describes how I've felt for many years. Marketing is an important function of business - otherwise one could easily go broke waiting for people discover on their own what great goods or services a business has to offer. In a busy marketplace, getting and keeping buyers' attention is a necessary first step to developing a business relationship. But a lot of marketing people seem to think that the best way to do this is to annoy potential or existing customers, so that their employer's brand will always come to mind first, even if it is tainted with somewhat negative feelings about the product. In one way, I don't blame them - that technique is empirically proven to work, marketing people want to meet their targets, get paid, and go home like everyone else does, and the uncertain nature of business communication makes it difficult to adjust to the information preferences of each individual consumer. But in another way, I do blame them, for two reasons. One, because they are deliberately choosing to clutter up people's lives with unwanted solicitations of attention, often despite specifically being asked not to. One thing I really miss about living in the Netherlands is that the post office there gives you stickers you can put on your mail box/slot to indicate whether you are willing to accept different kinds of commercial mail, both generic and personal. Two, because a great deal of marketing material goes beyond a solicitation and description of goods and services and into bullshit and deception. Almost every marketing professional I've ever met seems to think that some dishonesty in commercial matters is OK. It's understandable, as they're partly backed by a legal system that historically regards many false claims in advertising as 'mere puffery' - essentially saying that because consumers are exposed to a lot of bullshit anyway, it's OK to bullshit them. I disagree, and the greater the degree of bullshit I receive from any given business, the more likely I am to retaliate against them in some fashion, by adding them to spam lists, badmouthing them within my social circle, or occasionally responding with bullshit communications of my own designed to waste their time - followed up with helpful comparisons to their own marketing materials so they understand that deception doesn't pay.

CaptSpify 10y ago
Why Advertising is So Annoying - School of Life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5JdX_iQ2Hk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5JdX_iQ2Hk
desireco42 10y ago
Unfortunately most of annoying marketing actually is producing results, which is why people are using it. But I am with you in that, that for all the money marketing people are getting, they could be more creative how to get our attention and how to reach us. Most of them just repeat over and over same old stuff, whether it is direct mail, spamming your inbox or retargeting.
- anigbrowl 10y ago
  Oh I don't want them to be more creative. At least the more predictable they are the easier I can filter their bullshit out. What I really hate is the arms race for attention. For example I got really annoyed some years ago when fonts got good enough that marketing people started sending out mail that to a casual glance looked to have a hand-written address - naturally people are more inclined to open a hand-written letter first since it appears to be a personal rather that commercial communication. Then a year or two back someone tried to launch a startup here - without much success, thank heavens - that paid people (poorly) to actually write out addresses and even letters by hand, so that people could receive 'genuine' hand-written mail from businesses they were dealing with, which would appear to be a personal thank-you note from the CEO or whatever. Happily most other HN readers were similarly dismayed and the founder was excoriated, though I'm sure the business lives on and is probably profitable given the economic incentives. Living in the US, I really don't think that full first amendment protections should extend to corporations or commercial speech. Sure, corporations are legal persons (for some very valid reasons), but that personhood should be severely limited - after all, we wouldn't allow corporations to start launching artillery shells at each other on the theory that they deserved second amendment rights (in the USA obviously). I don't favor pre-emptive censorship, but I do favor the idea that deceptive commercial speech should expose the dishonest speaker to severe civil damages as punishment for seeking to exploit public trust mechanisms for private asymmetrical gain.

excalibur 10y ago

All automation is out-of-hand by definition.

kurthr 10y ago

I wish they would stop calling this Marketing, and call it Advertising or Sales... or just call it Spam. Yes, I know that Push Marketing and Marketing Automation is a thing and that they probably originally chose the words because they didn't have such a negative connotation (that's good marketing!), but what does this really have to do with a market? I am not a market... just an unwilling product being packaged and sold.

JeremyMorgan 10y ago

The biggest issue with this for me is the signal to noise ratio is getting too hard to determine. I don't want to ignore a real human reaching out to me for something, but I often do. And for recruiting purposes it's really bad (I'm sure many of you face this). I don't want to just ignore a true recruiter who would like to talk to me about a position, but answering every single spammed out email is out of the question.

soared 10y ago

These emails are only a touch worse than corporate blogs that look like personal blogs. If this was on a personal blog it would be genuine, but finishing this post only to see a call to action and marketing speak at the bottom really counters his point.

dkarapetyan 10y ago

Soon automated marketing will be getting responses from customer proxies and we will achieve the singularity. On a more serious note I think the article points out something that automation erases. This person wants a genuine interaction instead of a simulacrum of a human interaction. Hamming has a great lecture series where he consistently re-iterates the point of human/machine interactions as a symbiotic relationship where the machines augment and enhance human qualities instead of just substituting for them. Norbert Weiner before him says the same things at the dawn of cybernetics and information theory. There is much potential in these machine enhanced systems but it seems like it is all being squandered.

legitster 10y ago

I'm actually a Marketing Automation Specialist, and I would like to clear up that this is not marketing automation. These are just canned emails. The fact that they use email automation systems for them is silly as I can pretty much do the same thing with an Excel spreadsheet and a mail merge. Usually these emails are the result a sales-focused organization being oversold on a marketing platform and trying to put it to good use the only way they know how: buying lists and sending them unsolicited emails. But marketing automation in general is much more all-encompassing and you shouldn't necessarily mind it when done well. More and more it doesn't even involve email.

CrackpotGonzo 10y ago
What are you currently working on? Always curious about fellow marketing automation people.
- legitster 10y ago
  Experimenting with creating a very rudimentary internal API to handle some unique lead processing. Also, web personalization, but we are not very happy with the product we are using and are trying to work out some kinks.
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    Do you foresee identifying people who hate targeted advertising and pulling back the amount of messaging they get? It actually seems to be the case already, but I dream of the day where the facial recognition system in the store turns on a little red light on the cash register, notifying the cashier that I'm going to respond negatively.
    - legitster 10y ago
      We kind of do that already. We identify user groups that have low response rates and cull them automatically, or put them on a lower frequency program. Good, quality leads are expensive and you don't want to completely burn them out. We also have built-in stopgaps that limit the amount of emails people get. Nobody gets more than x per unit of time, the ratio of which we are always trying to push down.

Animats 10y ago

SpamAssassin is discarding almost all of those for me. I just looked in the reject folder, and there are hundreds of such messages, all rejected. If you're seeing those, your spam filtering is inadequate. Are those getting through Gmail's filters? If they are, Google is slipping.

yborg 10y ago
>Google is slipping Or maybe Google is monetizing. Trusting an advertising company to not forward you advertising is somewhat naive.
- Animats 10y ago
  Google apparently does now have a whitelisting program for bulk senders. AcceptEmail claims to be whitelisted.[1] [1] https://www.acceptemail.com/us/blog/acceptemail-authorized-by-google-for-use-of-action-buttons https://www.acceptemail.com/us/blog/acceptemail-authorized-b...

uptown 10y ago

Anyone have success with Unroll.me? Wish there was a way to use it without handing over access to my email account.

e1g 10y ago
I used unroll.me several times, and every time it helped to reduce the inbound end of the email funnel. Because of privacy concerns, now I just search for "unsubscribe", and go through the process manually - this catches >90% of automated emails and takes 2 minutes to clean up the inbox.

Spooky23 10y ago

Marketing is always a pain in the ass. One persistent Salesdude actually figured out where I ate breakfast and showed up there to run into me once. The email version is easier to deal with. It's moderately annoying,but really no big deal.

Gustomaximus 10y ago
Marketing <> Sales It's kinda like a designer and developer. People who only see IT work from a distance may feel they are 'people who make websites' but there is a entirely different skillset and method difference, but there can be some crossover and they combine well together.
- Spooky23 10y ago
  As a target of a lot of both marketing and sales, from my pov they are merging. These super targeted email and phone campaigns are more like a sales process. Marketing traditionally was about educating with propaganda and matching problem with solution for lead generation. Now there's more attempts to actually sell! On the sales side, the old school salespeople who were really there to build relationships and solve problems are a dying breed. Modern salespeople are hamsters on some micromanaged CRM wheel, even from big companies.
  - davidivadavid 10y ago
    Direct marketing isn't exactly new. Whether your consider it marketing or sales is kind of an academic debate, but that overlap has always existed (how could it not?).

Terretta 10y ago

It's not "getting" out of hand. This exact mass personalized campaign style has been around since before the Internet. I managed IT at a printing press where we used letterpress printing on cotton rag paper to "type" "personal" letters to lists of a million people. We "signed" the letters in different ink. We paid extra for first class stamps instead of postage meter. And, we would send up to five letters in a series each referring to the one before, and by the last letter, we printed yellow highlighter over key sell phrases and 'wrote' in the margins with different colored ink to say this is the stuff that really matters to you. These campaigns were deadly effective.

Swizec 10y ago
Sounds like drip campaigns on steroids. Know any tips for how to learn more about this? I've found drip campaigns very converty, but I'm still a total newb.
- chinathrow 10y ago
  Drip campaigns sound like spam to me. That is, from an european perspective.
  - devoply 10y ago
    Not really spam. The person you are e-mailing is using your product. So it's about connecting with that person and helping them use your product to such an extent that they stick around and pay for your product. It would be great if you could give your personal attention to each and every customer, but you can't.
    - tomc1985 10y ago
      It's way too easy to sign up for 10 different services and receive 10 different "personalized" e-mails, when you just wanted to be left alone and check things out. Most of the time if money is going to change hands I want a simple transaction, without additional humans sticking their grubby hands in and complicating things. High-touch sales does that.

cmac2992 10y ago

I think you'd be surprised to hear that a lot of these emails aren't automated. Templatized definitely. automated, maybe. Fortune 500 companies employee fleets of just out of college marketing majors to do just this sort of thing.

davidgerard 10y ago

How can we impose an automated, scalable cost on this sort of marketing? Or, calling it what it is, spam.

anchpop 10y ago
Someone had the idea that the one sending the emails should be the one hosting them, not the one receiving them. The cost would be insignificant for most people but people who send a huge amount of emails would have to pay significantly more than they do today
- greenshackle2 10y ago
  Another idea is proof-of-work systems - the sender has to prove that they've performed some work. hashcash is an example, where to sender has to compute a hash with certain properties, and use is as a 'stamp'. You'd need a whitelist system along with it, else legitimate lists with large subscription bases would get hit hard.
- rogerbinns 10y ago
  While sounding good in theory, it changes a dynamic in practise. In particular reading a mail would now require connecting to the sender's systems in order to get the message. That would then give them read confirmation, confirmation that your address is valid, location information (geoip etc) and an opportunity to deliver different content when you request the message versus the stub that was sent announcing it. As is usual with these kind of proposals, you'll find it ticks many items on the checklist: https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt
Gustomaximus 10y ago
I've always thought it would be good to setup a LinkedIn type platform that let's the user 1) put a white list of contacts or 2) A price to contact. If your not on the whitelist any contact gets a response of "please pay X" for emails to get through. People can place their own value on their time and advertisers can decide if this is worth it. Also you could add a call feature where if a recruiter/sales person wants to schedule a call they can (via forwarded number to keep anonymity) at the agreed rate.

20years 10y ago

I think good marketing automation is very specific to the phase the user is in and doesn't even always involve email. For example, if a user signed up to your SaaS and started the process but didn't finish, an email guiding them how to finish or asking if they need help in that step can be helpful. Or if a shopper added a product to their cart but didn't check out, a remarketing ad showcasing that product with a promo may remind and entice them. So many are just pushing out generic mass emails every 3 days and calling it marketing automation. That is not marketing automation, that is spam.

username223 10y ago
> a remarketing ad showcasing that product with a promo may remind and entice them. Is there a part of you that is still human? If your "user" didn't buy the thing, that may be because that human decided he didn't want it. Pestering him ("reminding" or "enticing") may shove him farther down your sales funnel, but don't pretend it's anything but hostile.
- gk1 10y ago
  "Hostile" is taking it a bit far. If the "reminder" ad wasn't there, then you would just be seeing some other (less relevant) ad.
  - username223 10y ago
    No, I wouldn't -- blocking web spam is pretty easy, and I crack down hard on companies that send me email spam (your "reminders," and everything else from your domain, go straight to the trash). If I have decided that I don't want to buy your thing, you should respect my decision.
    - 20years 10y ago
      I think you may only be seeing things from your own point of view. The % of people that click and complete purchases from these re-marketing ads when they are done correctly is huge. Oftentimes in the 80% range when done correctly. When someone places something in a shopping cart but then leaves without finishing the purchase, that shows intent. There are a lot of things that could have interrupted that purchase. Reminding them about it and even offering a % off promo is very effective and many people appreciate it. Yeah when done poorly, it can be ineffective and overbearing but I think that is the case with a lot of things that are done poorly.

ardeay 10y ago

Here is a pull quote from an article that published today "As People Get Weary of Sales Automation, Direct Sales Contacts Prevail The email automation era is becoming very easy to spot, and it’s happening everywhere. Multiple emails like this land in our inboxes on a daily basis. This robotic tactic may even begin to harm a brand’s reputation. Sales people will go back to being people and will personalize an email or pick up the damn phone. The excitement of automation in the digital era will also make people realize that they like to talk to people" http://www.cmswire.com/digital-marketing/marketing-trends-shaping-the-year-to-come/ http://www.cmswire.com/digital-marketing/marketing-trends-sh... Seemed relevant ;)

double0jimb0 10y ago
Content marketing, yay!
- ardeay 10y ago
  srs :)
jodrellblank 10y ago
With 1 you and millions of companies, how long before your phone is continuously ringing with direct sales contacts?

jerkstate 10y ago

My wife got one of these ads from a car dealership. It was made to look like an Outlook email printout from a sales rep at another dealership addressed to the guy who had sold her car to her. The email stated that the dealership had an interested buyer for that particular model year (about 5 years old) and that hers was the only one in the area. They said that if she came in, they would give her a free oil change and offer her above market rates for a trade in. The printout had what looked like a hand-written post-it stuck to it asking her to get ahold of the sales rep in question. I was suspicious but she followed up and found that the sales rep who had supposedly sent the email was not even a real person. It was a pretty advanced scheme to try to cover up the fact that it was just a way to get her into the shop, inspect her car, and find all sorts of problems with it and pressure her into trading it in. Probably the scummiest thing I've seen in a long time.

zippergz 10y ago
For every car I've bought in the past 15 years, at some point I've received a letter from the dealership telling me that my car is in "high demand" and that they'd pay me a premium price to buy it from me (of course with the expectation that I'll buy a new car from them, and the "premium" price probably isn't). I've never received one this sleazy, but unfortunately it seems to be pretty standard practice.
- sgs1370 10y ago
  I've only bought 4 cars, and this last one has had much worse spam, some via mail but so much more via phone (3-4 per week, warranty and sales), to the point where the next time I buy (if ever) I will use a burner phone #.
  - wcummings 10y ago
    >only bought 4 cars Since when is 4 cars not a lot of cars?
  - lisivka 10y ago
    Pickup the phone then mute it and wait until caller will drop the call. Works fine for me.

zeveb 10y ago

For some reason the entire article consists of lines collapsed on top of one another. Very odd.

colinbartlett 10y ago

I get so many of these, that upon receiving the first one, I just immediately setup a filter to move everything from that sender into the Trash. They never have an "unsubscribe" and they are always followed by a series of ever more desperate messages, so that's really the only way to keep them out of my inbox.

username223 10y ago

> Here's an example from LinkedIn. This is the fifth email I have received from this "person". If you still receive any email from @linkedin.com, you need to fix your spam filter so that no longer happens.

noahmbarr 10y ago

(full disclosure we, and most scaled Enterprise SaaS organizations, use these tools) This is probably NOT marketing automation (Marketo, Eloqua, or HubSpot) you're coming up against, it's a new class of tools that run "playbooks" via moderately sophisticated mail merged email campaigns. It's an effort to automate and/or optimize what junior sales staff (often called Sales or Business Development Representatives) do. Some of those tools include Outreach.io, Salesloft, and Toutapp. It could also be a home brewed app firing these emails. These are designed to seem like a person wrote those emails to you, but really they are running on a schedule and logic, listening for pixel loads, link clicks, and/or your response. If you don't respond, they can respond to themselves after X business days/hours, etc. They are being optimized for conversion, and some even have A/B testing built in. Coupled with outsourced labor or scrapers focused on picking up on signals and populating a specific field to be mail merged (in OP's case, a title from a job posting), some of these things literally run themselves. Generally, you get a human when you respond back -- as the algorithms aren't smart enough [yet] to respond back appropriately. Hope this clears it up. I hate being on the other side of these things too. If you get one and want it to stop, either click the CAN-SPAM opt out or briskly respond accordingly.

peteretep 10y ago
That surprised me about the article: I regularly see stuff like this from recruiters but there's almost always a give-away unsubscribe link.
justzisguyuknow 10y ago
I work for a sales team that uses one of these tools. I think one part of the picture that you've left out is that (at least in our case, and I suspect in many other companies) it's actually the junior sales reps (SDR/BDR/etc) themselves who are using the tool to scale their own prospecting communication. So I don't think it's necessarily quite as malicious as OP believes; these are emails that the rep would be sending personally, but the tool allows them to automate parts of the process and scale up their volume by an order of magnitude. Much of a BDR's job is to find an email template that works for a certain type of prospect, and then to find as many of that type of prospect as possible and send them that email. You can expand this to a 'cadence' of emails. But whether or not they are automating their work with this kind of tool, the prospect's experience wouldn't change much. Edit: I should also add that (again – in our case) we push our BDRs to send one-off, personalized emails and get on the phone as much as possible. They're ultimately judged by the amount of business they generate, not how many prospects they blast emails to.

WhitneyLand 10y ago

Many of these do not have a CANSPAM unsubscribe, as the author pointed out. How is this legal and not a violation of CANSPAM?

beejiu 10y ago
If it is anything like the law in the UK, there is probably an exemption for B2B business communications. (I.e. the law protects consumers not businesses.)

barrkel 10y ago

Who replies to unsolicited marketing email even if it's from real people and not templates? If we rewarded that behaviour, everybody would do it - and it would destroy email's utility. So I ignore them one and all.

arkitaip 10y ago
Don't just ignore, mark them as spam, especially if you're using Gmail or another big email provider as this will train their spam filters.

pascalxus 10y ago

Don't hate on the email outreach because it's automated. If your going to hate it, do so for sincere reasons: namely that you're not interested in their services. And, if you are interested and you reply, then you should be grateful they reached out to you. I wouldn't mind an automated message if they had something I really really wanted. The problem is, 99.9999% of the time, automated message or non-automated messages aren't offering me anything I actually want. Case in point: if an automated message offered you a mansion in your neighborhood for sale, at 200$, would you really be upset that the message was automated?

MaulingMonkey 10y ago
> Don't hate on the email outreach because it's automated. If your going to hate it, do so for sincere reasons: namely that you're not interested in their services. I get emails from services that I'm actively trialing and evaluating to see how effectively it meets my needs. That's how they got my email address in the first place. I'm interested as hell in their services. I may have already bought their services. I have exactly zero interest in being interrupted and distracted by an ad copy regurgitating the same basic information I already looked at on their fucking website - or worse, sharing information they hid from their website. I cannot hit unsubscribe fast enough. If it wasn't worth writing, it certainly wasn't worth sending! > Case in point: if an automated message offered you a mansion in your neighborhood for sale, at 200$, would you really be upset that the message was automated? I would be upset that they've clearly sold my email address to a third party - or worse, have some kind of advertisement XSS stealing login emails - spamming me clear scams, email their security alias to notify them assuming the worst, make my spam filters more aggressive, and second guess if I really want to entrust their services with any of my data. Even if, somehow, against all odds, you could convince me it was a 'legitimate' offer, I'd assume the automation was bugged and the offer would fall through, or that the property had some kind of significant issue - huge tax burden, implied responsibility for superfund site cleanup, onerous historical upkeep and maintenance requirements, etc. that would make me uninterested in the actual deal. You could convince my closest confidants to take up the deal, a perfectly legitimate offer with no such hidden issues or strings, honor it, and on my death bed I'd be wondering when the other shoe was going to drop on them, upset that they'd been conned. If I want a $200 mansion, I'll go out and find it, if it exists. Don't call me - and most especially do not call me with a python script pretending to be a real boy engaging in a real one on one conversation when it isn't - I'll call you.

revicon 10y ago

Do your part and mark these as spam. If enough of us do it, the emails will stop, either because they're in spam now or the marketers learn better.

Florin_Andrei 10y ago

> They try to play on the recipient's sense of courtesy. They look like an actual email, and it really feels rude not to reply. Nope. Not anymore. That used to be the case, I don't know, 10 years ago? But in these days of the spampocalypse, not replying to emails feels about as rude as stepping on ants on the sidewalk. Sorry, but my time is literally the only non-renewable resource I have.

StanislavPetrov 10y ago
Sending an unsolicited email solicitation is rude. Refusing to reply to an unsolicited email is not rude.
- ommunist 10y ago
  Thing is, the guy signed into LinkedIN ToS, opening himself for this vector of attack, ehm... voluntarily.

rf1331 10y ago

The emails work, it's how business gets done. Live with it or don't use email.

SixSigma 10y ago

This reminds me of a personal experience. I used to work for a programming startup, we all worked from home and logged into an IRC channel to communicate. People would come and go and you;d have the rounds of "hello", "good morning", "how are you today" etc. so I wrote an IRC hello_bot to do it for me, made a list of my typical greetings and that all was good. It only ran when I was logged in so if more interaction was required, I was on hand. Eventually our Sales Manager worked out it was a bot and got really angry, while the tech people (everyone but him) thought it was a cool and fun thing. He didn't appreciate that my bot to say hello to him probably took me more effort to get right than I ever put into actually saying hello. It was a good lesson to me. (later we found he had been skimming money off the top of contracts, rippig us off for thousands and the company ceased trading, I'm not sure if that's related :)

kilroy123 10y ago

I have a simple solution for this. I create a gmail filter that looks for the word "Unsubscribe" in it. If so, it skips my inbox, and is in a special folder. My inbox is a real inbox with emails that are real.

al_chemist 10y ago
You may want to reread the article. It's about messages without "Unsubscribe" link.

kazagistar 10y ago

Welcome to the zero sum endgame of the global economy. As real innovation slows, markets become a zero sum game, with everyone competing to push their "differentiated" brand on a finite consumer base. If improving your products is too hard, all you have to do is spend more on tricking the consumers into buying it. Except once everyone figures it out, the war escalates, getting more scummy and deceptive with each iteration. At least it means we won't run out of jobs for people; once there is no more engineering to be done, everyone will eventually work in some outlet of sales and marketing.

andrewfromx 10y ago

has the author watched HBO Westworld? Aren't we learning that a bot and a human BOTH have feelings. "People are designing their email automation templates to play on the sense of obligation and even guilt of their recipients, even though no obligation or guilt should be felt, since you're not getting emails from a human being, you're getting emails from a bot." This is so anti bot! no obligation or guilt should be felt is exactly what the evil do-ers in Westworld do to hosts.

banku_brougham 10y ago

Nobody has mentioned the movie 'Her' yet, so I will. Don't get caught up in being personally offended, I say imagine the evolution that leads to the point where you not only feel that initial warm acceptance of personal interest, but continues as you go deeper and receive recognition, understanding, even love.

ommunist 10y ago

In response for protection of automated marketing emails, can you think about such a bot as an extension of account holder persona? Many know how polite and honest are talent seekers from recruiting business, so does their bots. If we expose ourselves in social networks, we are automatically becoming targets for aggressive manipulation, nothing strange. FB, LinkedIN, they never considered you and I personas. We are goods, that has to be handled, resold and generating profits. Psychology behind modern recruiting business does not differ much from that of slave acquisition. And there is nothing wrong with it. Except one thing. Abolitionists could have saved you from slavery, but no one can save you from automated marketing unless you delete yourself from the Internet.

snotrockets 10y ago

I've made a very simple software that tags such emails, and generates an automated reply back. From the response I get, I suspect the marketers don't realize I'm using tools similar to theirs.

dilemma 10y ago
Hilarious. I think there's a market for your product.
siddharthdeswal 10y ago
Where can we try it out?

tomcam 10y ago

I am a polite person but I decided years ago to ignore these. My reasoning is that if it's truly urgent they will figure out how to get through the email noise, and if it's a friend they can just text or tweet or call me. I sleep fine at night.

Negative1 10y ago

Very much agree. I get a ton of these personalized emails that go something like "Hey it's Joe from Startup A, thanks for using our product. Reach out and provide some feedback...". My first instinct is to reply back, thinking this is a real human attempting to connect. Then I realize it's a con. It's sad but I'm much less trustful now when I receive an email from someone I don't know. It just shouldn't be that way but these lazy marketers are preying on human generosity and decency and when you discover this it just leaves the worst taste in your mouth.

kumarski 10y ago

I don't think so. Companies often die because they don't send enough emails, not the other way around. Fallibility is your own worst enemy in a startup, and email outbound is one way to kill it faster. That being said, there should only be one follow up. There's only 2 reasons that have high response rates for messaging people outbound. 1. They want to make you famous and build a relationship with you. In which case you should respond. I always advise this as the best method for building customer relationships. Just setup a blog and reach out to them asking to interview them about what they do. Only after the outbound company knows the candidate, should they discuss the mechanics of their businesses and if they can help eachother. 2. If there's deep timing context. (Saw you just raised, saw you in the press, etc...) 3. (This one is really tough, but if you're very high profile, you can just reach out.) Everything else is likely low response/open rate.

settsu 10y ago

The author's own website uses automated "chat" that appears to be initiated by a real person.

prawn 10y ago

I receive loads of these sorts of emails, but one recent one stood out. They had a script that looked up my location, automatically found a restaurant nearby and randomly picked a dish from the menu. The email then attempted to make small-talk about how this individual had once dined at said restaurant and enjoyed said dish. And it might've been remotely convincing had they not used such halting language and brackets around the inserts implying they were variables in a script. There's automating general messaging, and then there's automating "personalised" smalltalk.