
You Should Probably Send More Email Than You Do - spatulon
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/05/31/can-i-get-your-email/
======
krschultz
Articles like this always bring out the part of HN that simply _can not
understand normal people_.

It's kind of funny that as a community we make a bunch of web apps paid for by
ads, yet all swear we don't click on ads. We all swear that we don't read
spam, yet somehow half the businesses on HN heavily use email marketing.

There are people out there that click on ads. There are people out there that
click through emails. If you don't understand that, and your competitors do,
you will get crushed.

~~~
tomjen3
Not really. He is offering incentives that normal people wouldn't like in
order to get hackers emails.

I totally would want to do something with email if my target was normal
people.

~~~
bdunn
I write code, and subscribe to a lot of newsletters.

When I get an email that provides me with some immediate value, and then
pitches me to exchange some money to deliver more value, I'm probably going to
open up my wallet.

Peepcode is a great example. I'm not going to spend time checking back to see
if there's new content, but I occasionally get emails for them advertising a
new screencast. It benefits me ("Hey, I'm partially interested in X, and I can
get a good baseline understanding of X for an hour of my time and $Y"), and I
know for a fact I'm not the only "hacker" who gets these emails.

------
alinajaf
I have _no idea_ why Patrick gives this amount of value-drenched information
away for free. What's encouraging is that the advice has gone over the heads
of the majority of commenters here, and no matter how hard he tries, his
advice on A/B testing doesn't seem to be catching on at large.

I don't have a product to sell (I'm working on it!), but I've found a
fantastic way to monetize patio11s free advice. The money I've made (and
saved) by doing this will feed and clothe my unborn child, ETA November.

1\. Read everything he writes about helping people make money. Automating SEO,
split testing and now email marketing (<http://startupbook.net> by Rob Walling
is also mostly about email marketing).

2\. Use that advice to help people make money. You can do this at work, or
with your freelance clients (neither will mind you trying to help them make
more money). Rather than theorize about whether his advice works or not,
actually try and see if it moves the right needles. You will be pleasantly
surprised.

3\. Read the stuff he writes about consulting and having the confidence to
charge higher fees. Then go be a consultant and start charging high fees for
the advice that you got from patio11.

You may feel bad about taking patio11s advice and selling it for a daily rate.
I did. So I send all clients that I talk to about implementing basic split
tests links to pertinent blog posts on his website. To date, not one has shown
signs of reading them.

They're a great deal more excited when I install visual website optimizer and
a full 20% more people click through when we change button copy from "Start
Here" to "Get Your Widget".

Somewhat relevant anecdote: I've recently been working with a client that
implements many of of the tactics and techniques that patio11 describes for
making more money. This client happens to be richer than Croesus. Their
process is centred around conversion (i.e. _conversion parity_ on a 10% sample
is a post-QA requirement for rolling out new site functionality). They have
entire departments with 10+ employees dedicated to SEO + Content, Email
Marketing and PPC.

Every month, they get richer than Croesus with a higher conversion rate.
Unless I win the lottery, all the money I'm likely to make in my twenties
won't amount to the average monthly _increase_ they see in revenue.

~~~
oskarth
Here's the beauty of this system: you're becoming a local authority on these
topics, but _your_ (and probably many other people's) authority is patio11.
What does this mean? At least two things:

1) History will probably remember patio11 as a Great Guy

2) People who are really interested, will ask where you got your inspiration,
and your reply will most likely be something like "there's this guy called
patio11 on the internet...". These will serve to further the impact of
patio11s ideas.

Without having any sources or immediate examples, I'm pretty sure this is how
things have worked for milleniums. It's quite a robust system that's good both
for you, your audience and the "originator".

Naturally, this assumes patio11 can still pay his bills, which I think he can,
anything else would be a injustice given his expertise.

~~~
patio11
Suffice it to say while I'm touched by the concern you don't have to worry
about me being able to make rent.</understatement>

~~~
oskarth
I didn't mean to imply that you couldn't - it was meant as a general statement
of people in a similar position, though my writing didn't really make that
clear.

------
mootothemax
Sadly, I think Patrick's going to receive a lot of _but I don't like receiving
email_ -type responses from people here who just don't want to understand that
they personally do not represent the average computer user.

It's an important point: just because you personally don't like something
doesn't mean that everybody else is the same.

It's also equally important to apply some filters when taking advice; my
favourite example being, by and large, ignore pricing advice from people who
would never buy your product _at any price_!

~~~
mikeash
If he didn't want people talking about their own preferences when receiving
e-mail, he probably shouldn't have dedicated an entire section of the article
to telling us that we should sign up for his mailing list and how awesome it
will be for us when we do.

~~~
tedunangst
I believe that's kind of the point. Despite the fact that you hate email so
much, there will be value to both parties if you do sign up. That's the only
way to prove you're "wrong" about email. :)

~~~
mikeash
Except the so-called value that we're supposed to get from his mailing list
consists of exactly the sort of items most of us want to _avoid_.

~~~
patio11
I respect that you might not like some things I offer, which is why I describe
them accurately and then deliver exactly what it says on the tin. My favorite
sushi guy sells lots of raw fish attached to rice. There are cute little
pictures of raw fish attached to rice to help you decide whether raw fish
attached to rice is for you. If raw fish attached to rice is indeed not for
you, my sushi guy will not think less of you. You may believe most people
seeing raw fish attached to rice pictures would be uninterested in that. My
sushi guy, if you asked him, would tell you that he really doesn't need to
sell to most people, he only has to sell people who love raw fish attached to
rice, and as to the topic of whether _anyone_ could possibly want something
disgusting as raw fish attached to rice, he might just modestly shrug while
standing in the middle of the building that raw fish on rice built.

~~~
mikeash
Yes, I get that not everything has to appeal to everybody. But this article
got posted here, which is basically inviting this community to comment on it.

------
bambax
> _Have you ever heard the phrase “You can’t judge a book by its cover”? (...)
> it is an empirically observable fact that most people, when presented with a
> book, will judge it by its cover._

But isn't the phrase "You _shouldn't_ judge a book by its cover"? (And even
when "can't" is used, what's meant is often "shouldn't").

Of course people judge books by their cover; they also judge people by the
clothes they wear, their height or skin color. Should they?

It depends. Prejudice is our own little Bayesian filtering; it works sometimes
but it's not "pure": it tends to have a strong effect on reality (for example,
CEOs are mostly of above-average height: not because being tall makes you a
good CEO but because we expect tall people to be leaders).

> _99% of geeks will report never having buying anything as a result of an
> email_

 _bought_ (just to show that I read at least this far!)

~~~
planetguy
I judge books by their covers. Heck, I judge a lot of books by their _spines_.
Publishers put a lot of work into designing book covers so that you can, in
fact, get a pretty good idea of their content, tone and style based on their
cover.

For instance, compare

"The Planet Wizard" [http://www.goodshowsir.co.uk/wp-
content/uploads/2012/05/Plan...](http://www.goodshowsir.co.uk/wp-
content/uploads/2012/05/Planet_Wizard.jpg)

to

"Taken By You" <http://img1.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/n16/n82162.jpg>

The actual maxim should be "Judging a book by its cover actually has an
extremely high success rate and can be safely done in many cases, however it
has a finite failure rate especially in terms of determining the _quality_ of
a book and so should be avoided in cases where incorrect judgement will cause
problems".

PS. Yes, I know those examples were entirely unnecessary, I just wanted to
take the opportunity to show off some amusingly terrible book covers.

~~~
heretohelp
This really only works for cheap commercial genre-material. This doesn't work
for quality works of literature.

Which leads back to the original point.

~~~
patio11
Given that you see a jacket with a buxom woman in a skimpy dress being
embraced by a leprechaun with Fabio-pecs, would you assume that this fact has
no predictive value with regards to the question "Is this, in fact, a quality
work of literature?" No, of course you'd assume it is pulp, which is why
people whose business is selling quality works of literature don't package it
as pulp.

Most of us are not in the business of selling anonymous writing written by
people of no particular expertise which is designed to have a shelf-life of
twenty minutes _and yet_ we spend extraordinarily amounts of time producing
things in a cover which says _exactly that_. We should, instead, devote more
of our limited resources to creating work in the cover that says "important
things you should act upon immediately from the people you trust more than
anyone in the world about this topic."

~~~
bambax
Only if it's true, though. If you try to sell pulp in a package more suitable
for serious litterature, you won't reach readers who are interested in pulp
and you will upset people who seek serious books.

I think the real problem you're trying to address is the lack of confidence of
programmers into their own writings; their bullshit detector is too sensitive
when placed too close to the source.

------
bambax
About email, what I feel is that:

\- I hate to receive unsolicited email: from people I don't know or businesses
I've never heard of; I always make sure to hit "spam" in Gmail for those

\- at the same time, I feel I don't get enough email from businesses where I'm
already a customer. For example, I bought custom-made shirts from Youtailor a
year ago; they never emailed me since last year to inform me of new fabrics or
new products, or simply to remind me that the delivery time is 5 weeks and
that if I want a shirt for a given time in the year I'd better order 5 weeks
in advance. I have hundred of stories like these.

~~~
kstenerud
On the other hand, I can't stand unsolicited emails from companies I do
business with. My first action is to click the unsubscribe link, and if that
doesn't work (quite often the case), add the company to my spam filter and
hope that their invoice emails still get through.

Unsolicited email is a scourge upon cyberspace. If you as a company want to
send me periodic emails, ASK me first. I'll probably say no, but who knows? I
might just say yes.

~~~
mindcrime
OTOH, I like receiving most email, excepting for the really low quality
"v1agra 4 u" spam, or Nigerian 419 scams or whatever. But well written, non
scammy email, which is pitching a product or service that I actually might
have a need for, doesn't actually bother me at all. And the emails from
companies I'm already doing business with are usually very valuable. Amazon,
for example, "knows" my musical taste well enough to email me and let me know
when there is, for example, a new Motorhead album out. That's cool. Mondo
cool.

------
nkurz
I think the title is misleading. Maybe "You would make more money if you sent
more email"? I certainly believe that mass email marketing works, in the same
way I presume that someone must be making money off all the Viagra spam that
gets sent. But there is quite a leap from "You would make more money if you
sent Viagra spam" to "You should should send more Viagra spam".

More and more small local businesses are sending me spam, and I don't like it.
Many of these businesses are small enough that I feel socially awkward
unsubscribing if it requires sending a polite personal email saying "Please
remove me". Instead, I just angrily delete everything they send. While I may
be an outlier, and almost definitely am not your target market, be cautious
taking silence as a positive response.

~~~
runako
>> More and more small local businesses are sending me spam, and I don't like
it.

Weird, where are you based? I'm in the US, and I've never had a local business
get my email address without me giving it to them. (Of course I gave my email
expecting to receive email from them; otherwise, why bother?)

~~~
nkurz
I'm in the Bay Area, and run a business myself. My address is listed as a
contact with a number of associations. Some of other members of these groups
seem to think that adding the full list of contacts to their mailing list is a
service to the community. Some are companies that I've corresponded with in
the past, who about once a year seem to take their entire list of emails and
slam them onto to their new mailing list. Others (recently a spate of real
estate companies) seem to have found my address by some other means.

Sometimes I've given them the address for some other purpose like notifying me
for when a special order comes in or to register for a specific event. I'm not
using "spam" in quite the legal sense --- I'm sure it could be argued that I
have a pre-existing relationship with some of these businesses. But unless I
have explicitly checked a box that says "please send me email about your
business until I tell you to stop", I consider these unsolicited commercial
messages to be spam.

------
IsaacL
I agree with him about email, but not about RSS feeds. I've trimmed my RSS
reader to remove all the blogs I rarely read. The TechCrunch slurry pipe was
one of the first to go, but I also removed lots of blogs that did occasionally
have good articles but drowned it out with too much noise.

I still subscribe to over 40 blogs, but most of them update very infrequently
and the articles are consistently great. (Ben Horowitz, Gabriel Weinburg,
Venkatesh Rao, etc). The people who do update frequently generally produce
short-yet-high-value content (Sebastian Marshall, Josh Spodek). In fact I
often find run out of good stuff to read pretty quickly.

------
Cass
"I have probably told a hundred anecdotes like “I just did an A/B test and
increased software sales by 70% with 99% statistical confidence. The change
was a two-character configuration tweak that I dismissed on a hunch six years
ago.” (That totally happened this May. Ask me for details later.)"

Would now be a good time to ask for details?

~~~
patio11
It's worth talking about in a wee bit more detail, but

@new_user.card_limit_for_free_trial = ab_test("user-card-limit-may-2012", [8,
15], :conversion => "purchase")

gives away a bit of it. (That's literally all the code. The old default was
15.)

Funnily enough, I mentioned I might do that test eventually on HN (
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3864079>) and at the time panned its
likelihood of success. Shows what I know, for the 495th time with A/B testing.

~~~
Cass
Interesting. I remember you talking about how it likely wouldn't make much of
a difference, because almost all parents have less than eight kids, and almost
all teachers have more than 20, so the number of people who'd be induced to
buy the software by an eight card limit shouldn't really be much higher than
the number who'd need more than 15 cards, anyway. Any theories on why it ended
up mattering after all?

------
amolsarva
Hard to disagree with this statement: most people read all their email

And: most people miss most of their feeds/blog posts

Which is the incentive for true spam, but if you have something useful to tell
your associates and customers, you aren't spam right?

------
bederoso
I have the impression that he's trying to glamorize spam. I suppose it also
depends on the concept you have of what's spam.

For me, if I receive a marketing e-mail from a company that I never made
direct contact with, that's spam. I don't care if they have a "commercial
agreement" and got my e-mail from a "legitimate" vendor; if I haven't
specifically subscribed for updates from you, you're spamming me, and I will
not care about your "content".

He makes a point of saying that this is a marketing strategy and that we
should not be outraged because someone is trying to sell us something. But
this is similar to someone knocking on your door to sell stuff; it's no
illegal, but it's annoying and I hate you for doing that. I like my personal
e-mail to be personal, and I hate having to filter out the garbage I never
subscribed to.

If I want to buy something, I'll go and search for it, or I'll ask someone
about it, but I will not look in my e-mail to see if I ever got an e-mail from
someone saying they sell it.

~~~
tptacek
You've misunderstood him. He's not suggesting that you buy email addresses
from vendors; he's suggesting that you establish the relationship that opts in
email addresses yourself. There is obviously nothing spammy about allowing
people to subscribe to your mailing list.

------
rdl
I realize I'm not representative, but I had to seriously consider whether I
should sign up for this a week or so ago (I did, and it's great content). I
hate getting "extra" email, other than direct personal email. I filter mailing
lists to folders which I read even less than RSS feeds (which, for my top
10-20, I read pretty seriously). I also am much less likely to "action" a ~15
page email than virtually any other form -- the only worthwhile long emails I
get are document attachments, which I save and read separately. Pretty much
any email containing text over 3 paragraphs is something I don't want to read
(usually, from crazy people).

Email is also a pain to refer back to. I don't need a SaaS pricing insight
right now. I will need it in 2 weeks. If it were on a blog or in a feed
reader, I'd bookmark it. As email, it goes into some kind of grey area of read
email which I'll have to find in Lucerne or something later.

Plus, the patio11 emails are "moral equivalent of your password" to forward,
which kills the one advantage of email for me (easy forwarding). A web url
which I can copy from my address bar is a lot more tolerable.

It's reasonable to do all this to me if either I'm non-representative or that
it makes it way easier for you to monetize. I'd consider sending email myself
since I'm sure one of those is true, but I still would be a lot happier paying
$x/yr for the secret patio11 email-blog feed. I guess I could figure out a way
to move the incoming mail into Google Reader or Instapaper.

------
rmATinnovafy
Its not that people hate receiving mail, they just hate mail that tries to
make a quick buck out of them.

You should really email your customers and prospects. But don't just send them
a boring borchure. Approach them in a personal way. Ask them what is bugging
them at the moment? Offer to help. Give them some love in the form of an
email.

I've been emailing people from HN for about a month. Everyone responds. They
all just keep the conversation going as if we were old friends. Some even go
out of their way to help me build my startup.

How do I do it? I really care about them. Every time I contact somebody, it is
because I think they are someone worth knowing. Not for networking
connections, but as a person.

Treat your customers in the same way. Talk to them. Be friendly. I know this
is hard for some people to do. It used to be so hard for me to do it. But I
realized that people want to deal with those who relate to them. In fact,
thats my biggest marketing weapon: I focus on making a connection with people.
To really interest myself in their dealings. The sales just happen by
themselves after that.

Note: This does sound like a lot of self-help books. I know. And it doesn't
work with everybody, because not everybody likes you. But it works with a lot
of people. I'd rather be mistaken for a friendly fool, than for an arrogant
know-it-all.

Do a quick exercise. Click on the usernames in this thread. Find someone who
posts their email on their profile. Send them a message with the title: "Just
saying hello from HN". Inside, say hello, and ask them what they have been up
to. Everyone will answer. Everyone.

------
edanm
So my story is, I once started a blog. I added an RSS feed and everything. As
soon as I showed it to a few friends, one of the first responses: "How do I
get this via email??". That's when I learned that most of the world still
likes to receive things they care about via email, and don't care about RSS at
all.

That's when I had the same realization as Patrick. Email is awesome. If I care
about something, I used to run circles to remind myself to check it out when
it became more important to me. Now, I just sign up via email, and it saves a
lot of cycles.

And hey, if I don't care about it anymore, I get rid of it. We're at the
point, with spam filters and legal forces, where 99% of what pops into my
inbox, I can make sure never gets there again if I don't want it. To most
things, unsubscribing works (it has to by law). The few things it doesn't work
for are probably not getting past your spam filter anyway.

------
Jakob
I disagree. I only "like mail" when it's sent to at most three people. All the
rest is unsubscribed to or I'll ask the sender to remove me.

Mail isn't made for broadcasting in my opinion. Aggregator sites like forums
and blogs work much better with commenting, tagging, even liking etc.

~~~
patio11
If you are accurately reporting your preferences (and hey, you might be!), you
are accurately reporting preferences which many people do not share with you.
Those people are numerous enough such that nearly every software company would
profit from giving the option to have their preferences catered to.

------
swecker
Another thought to the difference in email and news aggregators; If I want to
read a blog post later (but am busy now) I need to mark it in some way to
remember to get back to it later. My email inbox, on the other hand, keeps it
there for me till I read it.

------
286c8cb04bda
_> (The predicted future value of a customer is an odd duck for many SaaS
companies. I’ll sketch out the shape of the curve some time. It’s a weird
snake that requires a bit of explanation.)_

I'd be very interested in hearing that bit.

------
tomjen3
Sorry Patrick, you couldn't be more wrong.

I always read the articles that pop up in you feeds, if at all possible. Even
if they are long. There are few others I do this for.

I don't do it for all feeds, and I unsubscribe if I feel like they haven't
posted sufficient high quality stuff as of late.

On the other hand I dread getting an email newsletter. Most are deleted or
marked as spam on sight.

You know that emails are worth less too, or you wouldn't need to bribe with
great content.

I realise I am not the average user, but the average user doesn't need to know
how to improve his software either...

------
joshuacc
Best thing I learned from this? "Please confirm that you want that free video
and other emails from me" is a _much_ better subject line than the standard
"Confirm subscription".

------
mikeash
"Give me your email address and I’ll send you things that you’ll enjoy. For
example, immediately after you confirm your email address, I’ll send you a
link to watch a free 45 minute training video on improving the first run
experience of your software."

This is satire, right?

~~~
larrywright
I'm not at all sure why you would think that is satire. If you're his target
audience (people who build web-based software), that 45 minute video is quite
valuable. Keep in mind, this is someone who does consulting on just that
topic, at a good price, so getting his opinion on this topic for 45 minutes is
valuable.

~~~
mikeash
I have no idea who this person is. I just know that his article basically
says, sign up for my mailing list and I will give you a _free_ video that will
tell you how to earn $10,000 for just two hours of work. Maybe it's completely
legitimate, I don't know, but it certainly _appears_ to be one step removed
from "housewife earns $500/hour from home!" ads.

~~~
larrywright
To regular HN readers, he's known. As he mentions in the article, he appears
here frequently as a commenter. Generally, anything he writes ends up on the
homepage of HN. He's one of the more respected members of the HN community.

~~~
mikeash
Funny, this is just about the last place I'd expect to be told to pay
attention to the author and not the message.

------
its_so_on
I don't send more email because I personally don't like to get that kind of
mail. (not saying everyone needs to do this).

I just don't like getting the mail the article mentions. Quote from article:
"[Give me your email address] (link) and I’ll send you things that you’ll
enjoy. For example, immediately after you confirm your email address, I’ll
send you a link to watch a free 45 minute training video on improving the
first run experience of your software."

How many of you clicked and signed up?

edit: Several people downvoted me (fair enough) but did anyone sign up to the
guy's link?

edit: elsewhere in thread there's a valid point about not everyone being like
us. this is ok, though I don't know anyone who likes getting this type of
mail. anyone?

~~~
patio11
Howdy. I'm the guy.

So, you're pretty much exactly who I wanted to reach with the second half of
this post, because there is a great gap between a) your prior prediction of
reality and b) the actual state of reality. The actual state of reality is
"350 emails submitted in the last hour, approximately 60% confirmed."

This is useful signal for you, because the next time you have to make a
similar prediction about the nature of reality, where that prediction might be
consequential, you will ideally make a _better_ prediction. All HNers who run
a business have to make predictions like "I have a limited budget in terms of
time, focus, and resources. If I spend effort on getting permission to email
customers and then emailing them, will that do good things for the business?"

You might have had incomplete data prior to making your prediction of reality.
Here's some things which are probably material to that prediction which would
have suggested biasing it in the favor of more confirmed opt-ins.

1) I've spent a wee bit of time on HN for the last three years or so, and some
folks around here find that I say helpful things.

2) People will, generally, leap at the opportunity to get something which is
presented as being something of value. (Covered, in depth, in the blog post.)

3) A lot of people -- including people who are very similar to you in many
ways -- would happily ask to receive email if that were communicated to them
as being something of value from someone they trusted.

There's other things which would have suggested guessing a lower number than
one might have otherwise:

1) The call to action in this blog post is not graphically prominent. (See my
other comment on this thread regarding a squeeze page, which means a page
designed to encourage conversions to an email submission. This page is very
much not a squeeze page.)

2) You have to read things, go to a separate page, and _then_ take action.

3) The list requires double opt-in (the first opt-in is giving your email
address, the second is clicking a link in an introductory email to you saying
"Yes, I want to receive email from you"), which will always and everywhere
decrease uptake versus single opt-in.

~~~
its_so_on
Thank you for this detailed reply. You've certainly convinced me to at least
weigh the option more carefully. (And you're right, I never would have
predicted that many confirmed emails off of that link, in part for the reasons
you cite about prominence etc. And my low prediction was even though I knew
that HN traffic numbers, just in terms of number of hits to the submitted
page, could be potentially staggering. I thought your link would have very few
takers despite the extra traffic to the page it's on.)

I think one thing that is missing is that there is not an obvious social norm
of how many emails are absolutely okay. (e.g. if you bought something from me
this year, is it okay to email you once a month? once every two months? twice
a year? weekly?) wonder if you have any thoughts about this. (Sorry if I
missed this in the post.)

