

Meetup.com User Lifecycle - rishi
http://www.gettingmoreawesome.com/2011/03/18/how-meetup-com-brings-in-the-cash-with-personalized-email-marketing/

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city41
Yes meetup is really good at this. I started a meetup and for the first couple
weeks only about two people joined. Then all of a sudden the meetup machine
kicked in and practically overnight about 50 people joined.

They definitely work hard to make the $19/month they charge you worth it for
their customers.

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joe6pack
I run a large meetup (SVNewTech), and agree with a lot of the points this
article makes. I've tried to apply the email marketing concepts to my
startups, and have seen others do so, as well (Convore & Quora come to mind).

One interesting aspect of Meetup's email strategy that the author doesn't
mention (because it's only tangentially related): Meetup.com doesn't give
organizers access to their community members' email addresses. The only way
for the organizer to contact the community is through Meetup - this creates
lock-in to the service (and much frustration). It's probably a wise business
policy for Meetup, but becomes a point of contention for the organizers of
larger groups.

On a related note, Meetup seems to succeed in spite of itself. They recent
released sweeping changes to the design & functionality of the site without
notifying organizers, resulting it this epic thread of discontent:
<http://www.meetup.com/boards/thread/10376961/0/>

I think there's a great opportunity to create a service like Meetup that
addresses some of these downfalls. If anyone is interested in building
something like that, let me know: joe (AT) svnewtech [DOT] com

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jlees
The email alert method of retention works to some extent, but the more engaged
users (multiple meetup groups and interests) get so much email it just becomes
spam. Plus, alerting to new groups in a very high traffic location is also a
bit overwhelming. I wonder if they are tracking unsubscribe-from-email metrics
and aiming to satisfy this (probably quite small percentage-wise) set of users
too?

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ish_ish
Agree completely. I think there is definitely high-churn on their subscriber
base if things start to feel spammy. Basically yes something should be
considered relevant after I express interest in it. But I find that meetup
does a bad job of differentiating what the service sends out versus what I
decided to get alerts on. Compare this to something like Quora where when I
'follow' a topic (another type of indication of interest) I get email alerts.
But its simple for me to know as a user that I can stop following that topic
and stop getting alerts. That doesn't mean I shut down all of Quora alerts at
once. Compare this to Convore, where I unsubscribed immediately after I
started getting all kinds of email from them that seemed completely irrelevant
to what I had originally signed up for. I couldn't figure out what on the site
was causing all the spam. So what did I do? I shut down the entire service.
Bottom line you are playing with fire with email alerts -- make sure its clear
to the user whats causing the alerts to happen and give them fine-grained
tools to control them.

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jenniart
Yeah, I agree that alerts have to be very transparent for this model to work
in the long run.

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dmix
I've deleted my Meetup account on two occasions because of the amount of spam
they sent me.

I ultimately had to rejoin in order to attend certain events but I still lost
trust for the service.

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joe_the_user
I like Meetup a lot and I've had a couple active Meetups for a couple years.

The thing I don't like is that the feature they've been seem to be copied from
Facebook rather than being specific to Meetup - especially, it would be nice
to have to calendar and event oriented and less chat-oriented (especially,
it's annoying getting extra-info about event I already decided not to go to).

But the valued offered by Meetup is in many ways better than the Facebook
equation; Meet people you don't already know face-to-face rather than chatting
online with people you've known forever anyway.

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tewolde
I agree, and since meetup.com is a lot more locally relevant it has more
"opportunities" to connect with their users in a way that would not be
regarded as spammy.

Though it is harder to scale, I think there is a lot of potential in this go
local strategy.

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jenniart
I've never gone to a meetup, although I've checked out the site before... I
think if I saw a meetup about narwhals or Conan I would go. Lol

