12 ms·

Intercom is a terrible Mailchimp. So is Mailchimp

36 points by stickfigure 3y ago

mceachen 3y ago
Expect everything you send to go straight to spam unless you do a bunch of work with deliverability, which he didn’t really touch on. https://www.mail-tester.com/ https://www.mail-tester.com/ (no affiliation) is a good place to start.
- richardlblair 3y ago
  You can also use something like postmark for this, which has an unsubscribe feature built in.
- danpalmer 3y ago
  Absolutely this. At a previous company we got into a bad place with deliverability and ended up doing a load of work to repair it, several months of engineering time, moving domains, warming IPs, splitting types of email, building out better tracking, and ultimately, just paying the "deliver my email" racket fee to Microsoft.
- bl4kers 3y ago
  It said they sent emails previous to this project so presumably that's already been accounted for
- stickfigure 3y ago
  Author here. We're using the same mailgun setup that we already use to email our customers, so we're just kind of accepting that it's "good enough". However, thanks for that link! I sent our newsletter through it and got a 5.9. -3 of that was an easy fix (no mx record for mail.orbitkit.com). I think we can get it to "super good enough" without too much trouble.
  - stickfigure 3y ago
    Fixing the MX record and adding alt attributes to the images brought the score to 9.9/10. According to mail-tester, if I want the last 0.1, I need to add a text/plain alternative. I suppose if we really cared we could automatically render the html to plain text, but it seems good enough at this point. At any rate, big thanks for the link - I'll add this to the blog entry.
    - mceachen 3y ago
      NP! FWIW, I sucked it up and added a text version to my PhotoStructure emails. I didn’t want to give GOOG an single excuse to not deliver my email. (Also: I suspect you need to escape your <img> tag in “ensuring that every has an alt tags”)
      - stickfigure 3y ago
        Fixed - once again, thanks!
- cyclotron3k 3y ago
  My reaction too. > We aren't tracking open rates. [...] It's not hard. Dude doesn't know about Apple MPP yet
keeptrying 3y ago
With the advent of LLMs I really do think that we should be able to compose the services we want to match our willing-ness to pay. I.e use LLMs to generate the required glue code required.
gumby 3y ago
Maybe I've been living under a rock, but this surprised me: > recipient list ... with their subscribe/unsubscribe status > ...API lets us interrogate and twiddle a contact's subscribe/unsubscribe status. It can remain the master database. I have assumed that when I unsubscribe from a mailing list my entry is deleted from the subscriber database. Apparently not. If this is really the case this makes me want give up on trying to unsubscribe and instead just mark things as spam. Fuck these people.
- ljlolel 3y ago
  Think about it. If they don’t keep your email that you unsubscribed then if it comes in through another data source or is reloaded then it’ll subscribe you again. Keeping track ensures they don’t do it accidentally or automatically. Or for exports/backups etc.
  - chomp 3y ago
    Yep, I maintain a few Mailchimp mailing lists for our nonprofit, I periodically reaggregate, import, pull in new data feeds, etc. and Mailchimp will maintain the unsubscribe list. If I reimport an email on accident that's already unsubscribed, I'd never want to accidentally re-email the person again.
    - gumby 3y ago
      Should you not want to only subscribe people who explicitly ask? When I get unsolicited mail I definitely send it straight to trash, I don't even try to be nice.
      - sneak 3y ago
        People like us are outliers. Most people get notifications for every email they receive, and are used to getting emails from every business with which they transact.
      - ljlolel 3y ago
        You can be moving between different providers or accounts
invalidname 3y ago
Yes. Intercom is terrible. Just as I started reading it I was shocked the bill was so low... https://medium.com/@Codename_One/why-we-dumped-intercom-and-moved-to-crisp-and-so-should-you-e991a3b07411 https://medium.com/@Codename_One/why-we-dumped-intercom-and-...
danpalmer 3y ago
For some types of business Intercom pricing is hilariously high. It's great if you're selling a high priced SaaS product to a small number of business users. If you're in B2C though it often makes no financial sense because of this per "active" user pricing. It's not uncommon for a B2B active user to be worth $1k/mo, and a B2C active user to be worth $1 a month. There are great businesses in both of those, but only the former could even consider using Intercom.

36 points by stickfigure 3y ago

Expect everything you send to go straight to spam unless you do a bunch of work with deliverability, which he didn’t really touch on. https://www.mail-tester.com/ https://www.mail-tester.com/ (no affiliation) is a good place to start.

richardlblair 3y ago
You can also use something like postmark for this, which has an unsubscribe feature built in.
danpalmer 3y ago
Absolutely this. At a previous company we got into a bad place with deliverability and ended up doing a load of work to repair it, several months of engineering time, moving domains, warming IPs, splitting types of email, building out better tracking, and ultimately, just paying the "deliver my email" racket fee to Microsoft.
bl4kers 3y ago
It said they sent emails previous to this project so presumably that's already been accounted for
stickfigure 3y ago
Author here. We're using the same mailgun setup that we already use to email our customers, so we're just kind of accepting that it's "good enough". However, thanks for that link! I sent our newsletter through it and got a 5.9. -3 of that was an easy fix (no mx record for mail.orbitkit.com). I think we can get it to "super good enough" without too much trouble.
- stickfigure 3y ago
  Fixing the MX record and adding alt attributes to the images brought the score to 9.9/10. According to mail-tester, if I want the last 0.1, I need to add a text/plain alternative. I suppose if we really cared we could automatically render the html to plain text, but it seems good enough at this point. At any rate, big thanks for the link - I'll add this to the blog entry.
  - mceachen 3y ago
    NP! FWIW, I sucked it up and added a text version to my PhotoStructure emails. I didn’t want to give GOOG an single excuse to not deliver my email. (Also: I suspect you need to escape your <img> tag in “ensuring that every has an alt tags”)
    - stickfigure 3y ago
      Fixed - once again, thanks!
cyclotron3k 3y ago
My reaction too. > We aren't tracking open rates. [...] It's not hard. Dude doesn't know about Apple MPP yet

keeptrying 3y ago

With the advent of LLMs I really do think that we should be able to compose the services we want to match our willing-ness to pay. I.e use LLMs to generate the required glue code required.

gumby 3y ago

Maybe I've been living under a rock, but this surprised me: > recipient list ... with their subscribe/unsubscribe status > ...API lets us interrogate and twiddle a contact's subscribe/unsubscribe status. It can remain the master database. I have assumed that when I unsubscribe from a mailing list my entry is deleted from the subscriber database. Apparently not. If this is really the case this makes me want give up on trying to unsubscribe and instead just mark things as spam. Fuck these people.

ljlolel 3y ago
Think about it. If they don’t keep your email that you unsubscribed then if it comes in through another data source or is reloaded then it’ll subscribe you again. Keeping track ensures they don’t do it accidentally or automatically. Or for exports/backups etc.
- chomp 3y ago
  Yep, I maintain a few Mailchimp mailing lists for our nonprofit, I periodically reaggregate, import, pull in new data feeds, etc. and Mailchimp will maintain the unsubscribe list. If I reimport an email on accident that's already unsubscribed, I'd never want to accidentally re-email the person again.
  - gumby 3y ago
    Should you not want to only subscribe people who explicitly ask? When I get unsolicited mail I definitely send it straight to trash, I don't even try to be nice.
    - sneak 3y ago
      People like us are outliers. Most people get notifications for every email they receive, and are used to getting emails from every business with which they transact.
    - ljlolel 3y ago
      You can be moving between different providers or accounts

invalidname 3y ago

Yes. Intercom is terrible. Just as I started reading it I was shocked the bill was so low... https://medium.com/@Codename_One/why-we-dumped-intercom-and-moved-to-crisp-and-so-should-you-e991a3b07411 https://medium.com/@Codename_One/why-we-dumped-intercom-and-...

danpalmer 3y ago

For some types of business Intercom pricing is hilariously high. It's great if you're selling a high priced SaaS product to a small number of business users. If you're in B2C though it often makes no financial sense because of this per "active" user pricing. It's not uncommon for a B2B active user to be worth $1k/mo, and a B2C active user to be worth $1 a month. There are great businesses in both of those, but only the former could even consider using Intercom.