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I really hate these cheesy lines that are "excellent" according to the article, like: - "You had enough fluff marketing content and so did we. So the absofreak
by bonoboTP 6y ago
I really hate these cheesy lines that are "excellent" according to the article, like:
- "You had enough fluff marketing content and so did we. So the absofreakinlutely BEST thing you could do right now..."
- "Writing this from my couch at home, hoping to find you safe and well at yours. It's been a busy summer! I wanted to share more about out 2.9 release..."
No, just no. Leave me alone, we aren't friends, you did not write this to me personally. When I read such text I am mentally bracing myself and putting up my defenses because we are at war. You are fighting in the arms race in the attention economy at my expense. This kind of email is like mimicry in the animal kingdom. You are faking the appearance of a mail from a friend when it's a business. It's nasty, parasitic and off-putting.
But maybe it's a cultural difference. Perhaps American culture is more receptive to this. But in most European cultures politeness requires a certain distance and being overly enthusiastically friendly makes us immediately think you are a scammer (in real life too). So pay attention to local cultural customs because these kinds of fake-cheerful-friendly-informal mails don't work everywhere.
- tlogan 6y agoI do not think this is ‘American thing’. I think this is unique for ‘hipster start ups’ (not sure how to define them, but I can recognize one when I see one). For me, messages like this resonate like ‘we are cool and do not use us if you need us to run your business’.
- pau_alcala 6y agoThis is a great insight, our users are mostly american and they are pretty receptive to cheesy lines. I personally smile even though I know it's automated, just appreciate the creativity i guess? But I hadn't really thought about how these would sound for european readers. Will definitely keep that in mind
- TedDoesntTalk 6y agoI'm American and agree with the GP 110%. If I get an email like that, not only do I delete it, but I'm less likely to read your future emails. I think it is a California-centric "it's all good" vibe. Not all of America has California culture.
- edoceo 6y agoCalifornia native (east bay) checking in. These fake ass, liposuction, collagen injected carnival exhibit emails are bullshit. You should delete them and the companies from your life.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y agoLOL. Thanks for writing that.
- bhandziuk 6y agoI am American and these kinds of things are hard eye rolls to me
- eatingCake 6y ago> Perhaps American culture is more receptive to this As an American I don't think people like corporations feigning social intimacy either.
- encom 6y agoBut it happens all the time (according to my tiny sample size). A tong time ago, I was in an American coffee shop (probably Starbucks, I guess), and they asked for my name. I found that very strange and weird. You would neither be able to spell or pronouce it, so let's just go with James. This trend is beginning in Denmark as well, and I don't like it. It'd be easier for everyone if you just assign me a number and announce that when my drink is ready. I also encountered store greeters, which was the most bizarre thing ever.
- machello13 6y ago> But it happens all the time Doesn't mean people like it. I think there's also a difference between a low-level employee being friendly personally to me because it's their job and also it's just polite, vs some marketing employee being "friendly" to the 500k people on their mailing list. It's also always worth noting, is the case with many countries, the US is very diverse. People in NYC probably think very differently about this vs. people in L.A. or Boise, Montana.
- erikstrottmann 6y agoBoise’s in Idaho!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- currymj 6y agothe real point of the store greeters is to limit shoplifting -- they hang around the entrance watching people and may check people's receipts against what they are taking out of the store. making them say hi and act friendly to everyone is just a way of camouflaging this and making it seem less hostile.
- xapata 6y agoThat's American business culture. You are expected to be fake happy.
- tomrod 6y agoIt is exhausting. To be fair to the article writer, I too write for non-technical audiences with the idea that they are sitting next to me and we are having a friendly conversation. It helps the writer's block.
- dvtrn 6y agoI fight this fake happiness with every fiber of my being by being polite, professional and genuinely happy when something actually makes me happy. Otherwise perfectly content being perfectly content :) Faking it as another person said is exhausting and draining and I ain't got time for that. These opinions are my own and do not represent those of my employer, the bottled water industry, and certainly not the cat sitting behind me.
- bonoboTP 6y agoWhile friendliness and happiness can be positive, I think in sales it's often emotional warfare, for example with door-to-door sales. A vacuum cleaner salesman will try to manufacture a personal connection with strategic taps on the shoulder, asking about the kids/grandkids and the spouse, but ultimately this is so that rejection becomes emotionally difficult for the untrained and unprepared customer. I see these emails the same way as I see cheesy, slimy door-to-door vacuum cleaner salespeople.
- xapata 6y agoThere's a difference in intent which isn't obvious from the atonal text medium. Humans are pretty good at spotting fake in person. Thus the desire to shake a hand and look in the eye. Over email, I think many people have developed a decent sense for it, but it's much harder to distinguish the two.
- bonoboTP 6y ago
- astrobe_ 6y agoYep. We say "too polite to be honest" but "too friendly to be honest" works for me too.
- jonshariat 6y agoNone of our opinions matter though. We are not the target market usually. If the change in tone drives more business then it works. Now you could make the argument that ethically this mimicry (I like that term you used) is morally wrong. Its interesting because when you go to a coffee shop and they act friendly and helpful we like it and dont think about if they genuinely are our friends. I think if the tone is paired with overall user friendly practices by the company (for example not charging me at the end of a free trial) then the tone is appreciated.
- mattigames 6y agoCoffee shop employees can act overly friendly but never say things like "So the absofreakinlutely BEST thing you could do right now...", instead they use very short sentences and almost all of them have an utilitarian purpose like asking about your order; and if you entered it means you already decided to purchase something there unlike e.g. being approached by a sales person on a sidewalk or getting a sales email.
- dvtrn 6y agoand if you entered it means you already decided to purchase something there unlike e.g. being approached by a sales person on a sidewalk or getting a sales email. Until you start getting incessantly upsold to a 'vente' or upsold to add a bagel. I thought a friendly "no, that's okay, thank you" and a smile was enough but there was once a national brand franchise coffee shop that badgered me enough during the checkout experience, and on frequent enough visits when I'd get off the train and walk in for a cup of joe along the way to the office that I stopped going. "I'm just trying to help you get a deal on your coffee". Friendly, polite, chipper...probably pressured by a GM to upsell but I feel once a customer has politely turned down an upsell, maybe one more "are you sure?" and then after that just give a person some grace and let them buy what they've asked for.
- jonshariat 6y agoAgreed. Some of the examples were cringe worthy. Since the user is receiving an email they have shown some intent. To continue the example: its the barista being nice and suggesting add ons with a big tip jar right in front. Now, this is also not the only strategy out there, even for the same group of users. Before committing to a strategy like this you should do user research to understand your users, run A?B tests, and make sure it plugs into your overall brand strategy. IMHO a business that puts the business first will always come off as fake and unattractive to users (so companies will succeed until a competitor comes along who treats them better). A business that puts its users first and business goals as secondary to that, thrive and when the business shows a value and its actually backed up with past actions, its effective.
- purerandomness 6y agoCould you give a counter example of a well written, successful mass mail in your eyes that you loved to read?
- content_sesh 6y agoThe last mass email I received that was successful (got me to do something) I didn't actually read. The subject line was something like "50% off sale through the weekend" which was literally the only information I needed.
- bhandziuk 6y agoIs there such a thing? Either I go out of my way for something or I don't. An email is just annoying.
- GordonS 6y agoI just assumed this was an American thing; as a Brit, I find it so cringey it almost hurts, and I'm embarrassed on their behalf. I wonder actually, if anyone here customises their emails based on the mark's home region?
- content_sesh 6y agoIt's not uniquely American, its bog-standard "startup trying to establish a parasocial relationship".
- crocodiletears 6y agoAs American, unless it's in-person, and contextually appropriate, I always get real pod-people vibes when I get messages like this from my employer. I recently picked up a book written in this style. It's been nails on a chalkboard for me. I think the big issue is that it attempts to conform to the structure of a casual conversation, while eschewing established norms for casually written textual content. I know what a comment on the internet looks like, or an IM chat, and that's roughly what a casual email should look like. Writing a 'proper' email, and peppering in smarmy sidebars just feels sleazy, reduces the information density of the text, and makes me cringe enough to put whatever I'm reading on the backburner.
- peruvian 6y agoUs nerdy engineers hate this stuff no matter where we're from. But from what I can gather at places I've worked at, most customers are neutral to positive about it. Some REALLY like it, believe it or not. Tech companies are often stupid, but not THAT stupid. Most of the strategies in this article do improve open and conversion rate.
- asyncscrum 6y agoAgreed. If they wanted HN conversions the title would be 'Lessons learned from onboarding emails written in Rust'
- maneesh 6y agoThis comment reminds me of “No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.” And “For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.”
- dvtrn 6y agoI see a pretty glaring difference between the parent comment and your examples: the former is an example of a human response to the stimuli of being communicated with, the latter examples...well aren't. At all. They're reactions to features of software (Dropbox is the easy one to guess, is the other Airbnb?). How would you resolve this apparent dichotomy? Maybe there's something in your comparison that went unstated-but you meant to imply, and ultimately left me confused.
- solidasparagus 6y agoThe first one is the iPod I think. HN is a bubble that is far from representative of the general public that these products/emails are aimed at. I assume that point of the parent comment is to remind people that top-voted advice from HN about how non-engineers will react to something should be taken with a gigantic grain of salt.
- JoshTriplett 6y agoOne of the things I love about working with FOSS is getting to know the humans behind it. And some of the technologies and services I care most about are those where I understand the people behind them and share their values. Lines like the first one of those two don't work with me at all; they're targeting an audience that isn't me, and they do very much provoke the "uh-huh, what are you selling" reaction. But I do want to see the humans and the humanity in a business. I do want to see a face and a personality and a set of values, rather than just noreply@example.com. If I share those values, I'm going to be much more enthusiastic about the business, and if I don't, I may be less so. It's possible to create a cookie-cutter talking-about-the-weather-and-the-pandemic pseudo-personality that's kinda uncanny-valley human-ish, but doesn't take any chances. But that's not going to create that same resonance. So the question then becomes, do you want to be faceless or pseudo-faceless and try to appeal to everyone, or do you want to be yourself, stop hiding the fact that your business has humans in it, and appeal very strongly to people who care about what you care about?
- scoutt 6y agoI think these kind of lines only resonates within marketing people. At the end of the day, they are trying to sell palabra, that should be another platform for white-hat spamming everybody could live without; for sending the kind of emails that (for a developer) has a time-to-live in the inbox equal to the time it takes to drag the mouse to the delete button.
- awongh 6y agoI think the tone of your communications has to hit a middle ground because I also have a sort of visceral reaction to emails that are too formal: Dear sir, According to your previous request please refer to the following link to access your download. Our team thanks you for your kind attention. Yours warmly, blah blah blah Somewhere in the (subjective) middle is an email that reads like you know i am a non-litigious human but not your best buddy.