6 ms·

> 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

• ams6110 9y ago
  Yeah, that's how I feel too. When I get an email such as: > Hey {{ first_name }}, "Hey" isn't a salutation I want as a customer. We aren't friends. > We miss you. Bullshit. This is an auto-generated email. Computers don't "miss" people. > It's been a while since we've seen you. We know you get busy ... Yes, and now you're interrupting my busy day > ... but we'd love to see you again soon. In fact, come back and visit us in the next 5 days and take 15% off your order. If you did a good job with my last purchase, I'll come back when I need something. 50/50 chance at this point that I hit the spam flag.
  • AznHisoka 9y ago
    "I'm sorry for interrupting your day..." No you're not. You wouldn't have interrupted me if you were sorry!
    • Ntrails 9y ago
      That shit winds me up so much. But then broadly speaking so does every other auto-bot spam emial
    • taf2 9y ago
      It’s just like “sorry are you busy, I just have a quick question”
    • drchiu 9y ago
      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.
  • sametmax 9y ago
    I'm so with you on this. 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.
    • gotrythis 9y ago
      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.
  • CaptSpify 9y ago
    50/50? 100% for me. If they don't do double-opt in, then they are spamming me.
    • paulie_a 9y ago
      Also if you use light grey text for the unsubscribe, it is also spam
  • developer2 9y ago
    >> 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]"?
  • QasimK 9y ago
    Seriously, hit spam. You think it’s spam; I think it’s spam; is there anyone who thinks it’s not spam?
  • jaccarmac 9y ago
    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.
    • xivzgrev 9y ago
      Yea that sounds like it runs afoul of CAN-SPAM. It's supposed to be one-click away, where you can unsubscribe from all promotional emails.
      • jaccarmac 9y ago
        Yep and I reported them to the FTC. Which as I found out is really easy!
    • antonkm 9y ago
      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.
      • jaccarmac 9y ago
• buro9 9y ago
  I could believe that 91% of customer want to receive transactional emails from the companies they do business with. But not marketing email.
• louisswiss 9y ago
  > 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...
  • mercer 9y ago
    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.
  • QasimK 9y ago
    You and parent are talking about different kinds of emails.
  • HeyLaughingBoy 9y ago
    EDIT: If you're downvoting to disagree, please explain why Ha! This line was off the page when I read your post. I immediately upvoted it because (a) I agreed and (b) I knew it would be downvoted. Scroll down one line and ta-da, I was right.
• farnsworthy 9y ago
  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).
• Animats 9y ago
  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. [1] https://www.marketingsherpa.com/article/chart/how-customers-want-promo-emails https://www.marketingsherpa.com/article/chart/how-customers-...
• patmcc 9y ago
  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.
• xivzgrev 9y ago
  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.
  • howard941 9y ago
    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.
    • xivzgrev 9y ago
      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 :)
• DanHulton 9y ago
  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.
  • paulie_a 9y ago
    I do understand the reason for wanting to vent on a bad product, but I do encourage you to write positive reviews for products that wowed you.
• ken 9y ago
  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.