
When a Startup Sends a Passive-Aggressive Email Every Day - minimaxir
http://minimaxir.com/2013/05/overly-attached-startup/
======
memset
Wow, a lot of people here are lauding Weebly for their great customer
engagement whatever strategy. I don't know how effective these messages are,
but working in e-commerce, I can say that customers _don't want to be
spammed._

The one thing they have correct is that aggressive subject lines are generally
better at getting click-throughs than milder ones. "You'd be crazy to miss out
on this" works better than "Check out our new product."

I used to work for a flash sales website, and whenever I told people about it,
they'd uniformly say "Oh yeah, I've signed up for them! Way too many emails,
can you make it stop?"

I'm sure the folks at Weebly have tested this (or maybe this poor unfortunate
soul is part of some silly week-long A/B test to try and improve engagement.)
But my personal experience says that Weebly needs to get smarter about how to
engage.

More effective: Send someone a couple of welcome emails. Wait 4 weeks. Then
send them a message. BAM, lots of engagement, because when you receive the
email you say "Huh, this must be pretty exciting, I haven't heard from them in
a while!"

Have you ever signed up for Everlane? Go do it and pay attention to the way
they do onboarding and email marketing. They don't spam me, but when they do,
I'm like "NEATO LET ME SEE YOUR NEW CASHMERE T-SHIRTS" because it seems like a
rare opportunity to see a budding startup release a new product. It's all
marketing but done in a way that doesn't suck horribly.

~~~
arkitaip
The depressing part is reading the comments here on HN and realizing that some
people just don't see what the problem is. Ok, fine, forget about the ethical
aspects here and understand that when you spam your customers like this you
tarnish your image because you're effectively putting yourself in the same
category as the people who try to sell fake rolex watches and viagra pills.

I suggest that the next time a business, startup or not, tries to "lifecycle
email" (yuck) you, don't unsubscribe - spam flag them. If some business people
have such warped understanding of reality that they can't see spam when they
send it, at least they can get penalized for it.

~~~
npsimons
_I suggest that the next time a business, startup or not, tries to "lifecycle
email" (yuck) you, don't unsubscribe - spam flag them._

Much as I smiled a wry grin at this suggestion, I have to say, don't fucking
do this. Be an adult: if you signed up for something, take the time to try and
unsubscribe first. No way to unsubscribe? Unsubscribe doesn't work? Okay, now
you should start flagging as spam.

Unsubscribing has the added benefit of being more direct, in a "hey, we
spammed this guy with 4 emails in three days, then he suddenly unsubscribed",
instead of going "why are we being marked as spam? our lists are completely
opt-in!".

~~~
scott_s
Giving a company my email is not implicit permission to email me whenever they
want. If you actually checked the box "yes, please email me," then yes, you
gave permission. But if I did no such thing, then it _is_ spam.

~~~
lucisferre
I may be entirely wrong here, but I think it is.

> the recipient has not verifiably granted deliberate, explicit, and still-
> revocable permission for it to be sent.

I'm pretty sure that giving your e-mail is explicit permission and an
unsubscribe link makes it still-revocable. That said I completely appreciate
that emotionally it feel like spam, and I can't imagine why any business in
their right mind would feel this was a good business practice.

source: <http://www.spamhaus.org/consumer/definition/>

~~~
PeterisP
No, giving my e-mail address is just that - giving an email address; it does
not come with permission to send automated daily emails. For example, I login
to facebook with my email address, but I have explicitly withdrawn any
permission for facebook to send me any notifications by email in all the opt-
out settings.

Subscribing to messages should be explicitly opt-in, and in a bunch of
countries is legally required to be opt-in. If I miss an opt-out checkbox, and
you send a marketing email - that is spam by definition, if gmail decides to
filter you out, then by all means it was the right thing to do; and if it was
a local business, they would be fined for that.

------
patio11
Can I refocus this conversation away from you and Weebly? Both for avoidance
of personalizing this and to avoid this turning on the specifics of this post
and their copy, because the takeaway message for most people reading this is
"Should we implement lifecycle emails or not?" rather than "What exact words
should I use?" or "What frequency is appropriate for a zero engagement user?"

Bob started using software from FooCorp. Bob, for whatever reason, was not a
great fit for FooCorp, and as a consequence has zero engagement. FooCorp is
unable to examine the inside of Bob's head, and must make predictions on Bob's
behavior based on their model of his decisionmaking processes as informed by
their experience with numerous similarly situated customers.

FooCorp made numerous attempts to improve their business relationship with
Bob, despite the risk of annoying Bob. They can justify this by pointing to
observable evidence that, if they mail 100 Bobs, statistically Bobs actually
do start using the FooSoft, and (anecdotally) their customer support team gets
emails and blog posts saying "Thanks for being so attentive to my needs!!1"
This is actually not shocking to FooCorp, because FooCorp has years of
experience with onboarding customers onto FooSoft, and they have talked to
_hundreds_ of people who, when asked "Why did you not finish using FooSoft?",
responded "I got busy. / I forgot about it. / I didn't do that. Wait, I did
that? Wow. Um, hold on, I want to log in right now and fix that. No seriously.
That was something I was going to do."

Also, when you get down to brass tacks, if Bob has zero engagement with the
product, Bob will not pay for the product, and thus the downside risk of
annoying Bob is to a first approximation zero. Bob might, because it is 2013,
feel that Bob's opinion of FooCorp is very important to FooCorp even if Bob is
not a paying customer, because social media and branding and word of mouth.
Bob may not run a software company, but if Bob were to hypothetically talk to
people who did, Bob might hear it is difficult to pay engineering salaries
with word of mouth but monthly recurring subscription revenues do not have
this downside. Thus a speculative hit to word of mouth does not weight very
persuasively against a demonstrable massive increase in recurring subscription
revenues.

~~~
npsimons
I think everyone here understands the economic argument for why this happens;
it's the same reason spam still exists. That's not the question; the question
is, is it right?

While the rightfulness question is interesting, I'll leave that to others to
discuss and go right on to the pragmatic consequences: I am very, very, very
unlikely to sign up for a service "just to check it out", precisely because of
tactics like this. Even if I do, I will give them a unique email alias that I
can disable at will (reject at SMTP envelope stage), and that I keep records
of, so that if I get annoyed enough (typically, if their unsubscribe doesn't
work or doesn't exist), I will keep a record of them as company, never, ever
to do business with.

I don't believe it should be marked as spam (I opted in), but it's also not
something I feel should be encouraged.

~~~
Spooky23
Spam and customer engagement are totally different things.

When you sign up to evaluate something, you're kicking off a sales and
evaluation process.

If you are at a restaurant and a good waiter notices that you're picking at
some crackers instead of eating your meal, it's normal for them to approach
you and see if everything is ok with your meal. You may not want to talk to
the waiter, but his job is to make you satisfied with your meal, tip him, and
return to the restaurant.

If you ask to waiter to leave you alone and he persists, that's a problem that
should be addressed. Likewise, if you don't want to hear from <Vendor X>, you
should make your feelings known and get an appropriate response.

~~~
rmrfrmrf
If you are at a restaurant and a good waiter notices that you're picking at
some crackers instead of eating your meal, it's normal for them to approach
you and see if everything is ok with your meal.

1\. the waiter is a real person.

2\. the waiter was able to identify a potential issue (the customer was not
eating), unlike the e-mail script, which only triggers after a set time period
of not logging in. The situation would be more analogous to me taking 30
minutes to eat my meal at a restaurant when the average sit time is 20, and
the waiter coming over at exactly 30 minutes and telling me 'did you know that
it's been 30 minutes and 7 seconds since you've been seated? if there's
anything I can do to help you finish your meal, please don't hesitate to
contact me!'

------
drusenko
I'd like to jump in and clarify a few things. First, we have recently been
testing the frequency of our email sending, and the author seems to have been
bucketed into the "more frequent" group. That being said, we were actually
planning on reducing the frequency of what we emailed the author by roughly
25%, including eliminating the "Your website misses you" and the "It’s been 8
days, 2 hours, 30 minutes and 6 seconds…" emails, among others. I just fast-
tracked this and it's now live, so our email volume when you sign up is now
much lower.

Second, we put a lot of effort into trying to send personalized email
communication that is specific to your use case, but it looks like we missed a
very important group, contributors to others' sites. This was a mistake. These
emails may make sense if you were starting your own site, but they certainly
don't make sense if you were just contributing to someone else's. I'm going to
make sure we revise that set of emails within 2 weeks to something more
appropriate and even less frequent.

Last, as many here are correct to assume, we are constantly testing and
refining our email communications. I think it's helpful to understand our
customer's psychology when they are signing up for Weebly, it is instructive
in understanding our thought process and why we send the emails we do.

Most of our customers (60%) consider themselves entrepreneurs. They are
bringing a new idea to life, things like chairigami.com, themintspace.com,
stealthelectricbikesusa.com or weeknightbite.com. They are quitting their
full-time jobs to do this and it's a very frightening process.

Creating their site is especially daunting and difficult for them, even though
it's so crucial to their success. Many of them start the process, want to
finish, but give up. We've found that the first week is the most crucial. In
our email communications, it's our goal to try to help them across the finish
line to a high-quality site.

In this case, we were emailing too often, and we've stopped doing that. In
general, most of our users do appreciate some help and encouragement along the
way, and we will keep testing emails to try to make that as effective,
helpful, and non-annoying as possible.

~~~
Silhouette
It's fascinating that even after presumably reading this HN discussion, you
would still write things like "reducing the frequency...by roughly 25%" and
"we were emailing a bit too often", followed by things like "email volume...is
now much lower" and "non-annoying as possible". Lots of people here are trying
to tell you something that could help your business, something that has very
little to do with the precise number of mails you're sending, and you don't
seem to be seeing it at all.

~~~
drusenko
Around the same time you posted this comment, I just edited my post to clarify
that we were already planning on removing many of the annoying emails,
including the "Your website misses you" and the "It’s been 8 days, 2 hours, 30
minutes and 6 seconds…" emails, among others.

I also just edited "we were emailing a bit too often" because it was more than
a bit, it was straight up too often.

If there's something I'm still not seeing, I'd love to hear your feedback.

~~~
Silhouette
Looks like we overlapped a bit there.

My point was that at the time I posted, numerous comments in this HN
discussion essentially said "You're being spammy and abusing the trust of
users", and to me, your comment read as "No problem, we're fine-tuning the
ways we spam people so now we're only going to indulge in 75% as much unwanted
harassment while abusing the trust of this particular group of users, and that
makes it all OK".

To be fair, maybe I just saw your post at an unfortunate mid-edit stage, or
maybe I'm just in an unusually bad mood for some reason and I loathe spammers.
But honestly, at the time it read like one of those non-apology apologies that
is only ever given by shady organisations you want nothing to do with. :-(

------
DanielBMarkham
The web is a tough place to try to help people.

They sign up for your free virtual ant-farming business, then they don't use
it. Why? Beats me. Beats everybody. You can either just ignore them or assume
they need help.

If you ignore them, they're guaranteed to go away. If you try to help and they
need it, good for you! If you try to help and they don't want it? They don't
want to farm virtual ants anyway. So they spam-flag you and you go away. You
made an extra effort.

This looks like the best solution to me to a tricky problem. It helps the most
number of people. Assuming that everybody that initially wants something is
going to somehow pester the crap out of you until they figure out how to do it
doesn't seem rational. How else should a service act?

I love a good rant, but I'm honestly left feeling like this person hasn't
thought this problem through from all of the relevant viewpoints.

~~~
scott_s
What you are describing is not what this person experienced. Weebly sent an
email a day, for a week. I understand one email, maybe even two after a few
days. But every day for a week is too much.

~~~
duck
I agree with you and I wouldn't like getting all those emails, but I imagine
all this has been tested and this produced the best results. If that is the
case, we can't really say this is _too much_.

~~~
tempestn
Yes we can. Spam produces good results too, for the spammer. Even if the
every-day email volume tested well in the short term, it will still likely
have long-term business consequences. And even if it works well for them in
the long term, it is still a net negative to society.

------
jmulder
People claiming the author should have just 'unsubscribed' are missing the
point of trust. The author didn't just want these e-mails, he actually lost
trust that Weebly was capable of sending informative e-mails at all.

This is a huge loss for Weebly, as they'll never reach the author again by
e-mail, even if they were giving away a million dollar.

All in all, in Weebly's case, the e-mails are just spam. They do not have any
function other than screaming for attention. Might work for 'growth hacking',
but doubt it will do them any good in the long run.

~~~
angryasian
agree, I think what a lot of people don't realize is that when you click
unsubscribe that it is a signal that your email address is active. For those
sites that are sketchy and may sell your address or do something else with it,
this only helps them. If they are spamming you without the option to turn down
the frequency its spam.

------
mootothemax
If you're a techie, what you consider to be annoying and terrible for "normal"
users is likely _vastly different_ to what those users themselves think.

Do you send lifecycle emails right now? If not, take Weebly as a good example
of what to imitate. If you do, see if there're any cool ideas you might be
missing out on.

Don't - whatever you do - take this blog post as justification or a reason to
ignore your users.

~~~
itafroma
Ignoring your users is one thing; sending a new user an email virtually every
day for 8 days in a row (with a creepy, "we know exactly how long since you've
logged in, down to the second" finisher) reeks of the stereotypical greasy
salesman hard sell, something "normal" users are well aware of (and hate) from
non-web based businesses. Weebly is a case study in what _not_ to imitate.

~~~
mootothemax
_Ignoring your users is one thing; sending a new user an email a day virtually
every day for 8 days in a row (with a creepy, "we know exactly how long since
you've logged in, down to the second" finisher) reeks of the stereotypical
greasy salesman hard sell, something "normal" users are well aware of (and
hate) from non-web based businesses. Weebly is a case study in what not to
imitate._

I think you're viewing this negatively because you personally don't like
receiving such emails.

Elsewhere I've referred to them as "Here's how to get the most out of our
service" emails.

You've chosen to view them as _creepy, "we know exactly how long since you've
logged in, down to the second"_ emails from a _stereotypical greasy salesman_.

If you view these emails as spam, you're not going to like them, and you're
going to think that "normal" users won't like them as well, as "normal" users
don't like spam.

I'm arguing that "normal" users _don't_ view these emails negatively, and so
they don't have the same issues you do.

~~~
itafroma
Let's say you're looking to buy a car. You go to your local dealership and you
see a car that looks promising. You ask to take a test drive, but the dealer
won't let you unless you provide your name and phone number for verification.
No problem, standard procedure. You take the test drive, head home, but decide
it's not for you and decide to look elsewhere.

The next morning, you get a voicemail. "Hey, mootothemax, it's Bob from the
dealership. I'm committed to doing everything I can to help you find a new
car. Let me know if you need any help in the future."

All good, right? Sure.

The _very next day_ , Bob calls again and leaves another voicemail. "Hey
mootothemax, it's been... 2 days, 1 hour, 46 minutes, and 27 seconds since you
were at the dealership and you still haven't gotten a car. I miss you. Relax,
take a deep breath. It'll be OK. _faint chuckle_ "

 _Already_ it's creepy. But we're not done. Day three, you get another
voicemail from the dealership. It's claiming to be Richard, but it's a
robodialer. "Hey mootothemax, it's Richard. Just wanted to introduce myself
and see if you have any questions. If there's anything I can do, please call
me back."

Day four. Bob on the voicemail again. "In today's market, you want to make
sure you don't spend a lot on gas. That's why we wanted to make sure you knew
our cars are the most fuel efficient in America!"

Bob doesn't call on day five. Must be his day off.

But he's back at it on day six. "Look mootothemax, I know it's hard to decide
which car to get; as you may have noticed, we also offer more expensive luxury
cars [to add to your confusion]." (okay, that last part Bob didn't really
say).

Day seven. "Okay mootothemax, I know you're having a hard time deciding to
pull the trigger on a car, so here's something I can offer: 3% off MSRP, but
only if we close the deal in the next three days. Call me!"

Day eight: way less than three days later. "mootothemax, it's Bob again. Can
you believe it's only been 8 days, 2 hours, 30 minutes and 6 seconds since you
came into the dealership?"

Do you think that this scenario is acceptable, or even desirable? If so, then
you happen to have something in common with only 8% of the US population.[1]
Personally, and I don't think it's fair or reasonable to say this is merely my
own personal opinion or failing, if a salesman took the above approach, I'd
consider it stalking and would've called the cops on day three.

If you don't think this is acceptable, why do you think it is when it's done
through email?

[1]: [http://www.gallup.com/poll/1654/honesty-ethics-
professions.a...](http://www.gallup.com/poll/1654/honesty-ethics-
professions.aspx)

~~~
mootothemax
_Let's say you're looking to buy a car. You go to your local dealership and
you see a car that looks promising. You ask to take a test drive..._

 _If you don't think this is acceptable, why do you think it is when it's done
through email?_

Because I consider these emails the equivalent of "Here's how the A/C works"
when you're on the test drive.

You, apparently, consider them to be nothing but the equivalent of having "BUY
NOW BUY NOW OMG BUY NOW!" shouted in your ear as you drive.

~~~
nacs
You have a warped sense of "informative".

Theres no content to these emails other than "please come back". These aren't
giving him any tips, they are not personal, they're simply autogenerated spam
at an exceedingly high frequency.

"Lifecycle" emails are supposed to be a nudge every so often (every few days
at most). They aren't supposed to be a naggy, daily, completely auto-generated
spam.

Also, this user isn't on the test drive. He's already left the dealership
parking lot and hes getting a salesman yelling at him to come back daily. If I
had a salesman doing this I'd not only not buy from that dealership, I'd
probably have a distaste towards that entire brand of car and go to a
competitor.

Rationalize all you want but 7+ emails in ~7 days is spam.

------
bdc
I received 15 emails in 10 days when I signed up for Full Contact. Yeah, I
wanted to check out your product, so I signed up and tested it out. No, I
don't need to be reminded that you exist every sixteen hours.

I had, separately, been discussing one of the less common features at Full
Contact with a real person there, and pointed this out to him, forwarding all
of the emails back to him as well. He apologized sincerely and helped figure
out why this was happening (over email, of course :) ).

It's just an insanely reliable way to turn my opinion from 'this product is
intriguing' to 'this product is irritating.'

If you're going to send email spam (and most startups have to, at some point),
at least make it pleasant.

~~~
jrabone
No, don't just make it pleasant, make it easy for me, the customer, to
control. Three levels is probably the most you need: 3) Trivia / social spam,
2) Announcements, 1) Security / billing / account maintenance; three little
checkboxes, three bits in a "contact status" byte field somewhere in your DB.
Do it. It's not the simplest thing that will work, it's the simplest thing
that makes your customer feel like they have some control in the trust
relationship you're trying to build with them.

And make it possible to actually close and delete an account; LivingSocial I'm
looking at you.

------
JonnieCache
New Relic do this as well. Extremely irritating, made worse by the smug,
overly familiar tone of the emails, which were phrased as if I'd shared a
frathouse with the copywriter or something.

EDIT: just looked back through them, and that last bit about frathouses was
probably overstated. It definitely felt like that at the time I received the
messages though.

~~~
bdc
Among my recent favorites:

"Hello NULL," -- from Leap Motion

"I wanted to follow up after meeting you" -- from "Developer Relations Team"
(not a person!? did I meet the entire team?) at SendGrid

~~~
reinhardt
Well at least it wasn't "Hello NullPointerException" followed by a traceback.

------
reinhardt
Overreaction much? Complaining about the email frequency would make sense,
daily emails from a service I didn't explicitly request to be mailed so often
is obnoxious. But "passive aggressive"? "Weebly is seriously threatening me
into publishing my website"? Seriously?

~~~
drharris
Yes, my first thought was clearly this person is unmarried; they have no clue
what passive-aggressive really means.

~~~
ZoFreX
I'd love to hear your definition of it, drharris?

------
DanBC
Spam is not about content, it's about consent.

This is _ancient_ , and it's disappointing that it appears to be forgotten
lost information.

It doesn't matter if the email you're sending is full of great information and
money off coupons. If you didn't confirm the email address and didn't get
permission to send to that email address the emails you're sending are spam.

I hope weebly has a checkbox for users to opt in to a mail list (or, at least,
opt out) - so by giving them his email address and not unchecking or checking
that checkbox this user gave them permission to send him email. So they're not
spam.

Not being spam is not the same as "acceptable" - an email a day would be
frustrating to many people.

------
Spooky23
This guy needs to go get a hug or something.

I actually signed up Weebly in the same timeframe after hearing about it from
a friend using my iPad. Unfortunately, you can't do much with it on the iPad,
so I signed out and forgot about it. I got a few emails from them, and to be
honest, I found them to be interesting enough that I read them and acted upon
them. Ultimately, I ended up not using Weebly, because another alternative
(Tumblr) was more appropriate for my use case.

End of the day, they aren't "spamming". They are sending you a tickler to
remind you of their product while you still remember it, which is a completely
legit thing to do. It's particularly legit when you consider that their key
demographic is folks who want a website, but want to build that site
themselves with drag and drop.

Spamming is when salesmen start assaulting you. I looked at an MDM product,
and lo and behold, I have no less than 40 calls from some asshat salesdude in
the last 7 days, including Sunday.

------
austenallred
Unfortunately, as a marketer it's really easy to see how this cycle happens.
You send out an email and you see "Oh wow, 75% of the people we sent this
email to came back to the site." That's your purpose - to drive engagement. So
you set up an email drip that perhaps gets annoying, but in the end you see
your numbers higher than they would be without those emails. You forget it's
about users because now they're just numbers.

This definitely isn't a problem unique to small or early startups. (Looking at
you, LinkedIn).

------
knes
I've wrote a similar piece of the subject 10 days ago.

<https://medium.com/this-happened-to-me/96a22e176b1>

The problem with those non personalise lifecycle emails is that they works on
the "commoners" but can easily pissed of the tech savy users. Lucky for
Weebly, they don't really care about the HN Crowd.

Lifecycle emails works best when they are highly personalise based on some
actions the user made in the app or on the website.

So please, if you are looking in setting up lifecycle emails, make yourself (
and the users ) a favor and use powerful tools like customer.io, getvero, etc
to easily create to personalised campaigns.

------
voyou
"We see from the fact that you haven't used our web site that you are not
interested in our web site. Have you considered, instead, being interested in
our web site?"

------
monkeyspaw
This seems like a pretty absurd response to me. First, as OP noted, they could
have just unsubscribed. Annoyance gone.

Second, they wrote, "if startups keep sending forward e-mails, everyone
loses." This is false. Anyone who learned about new features, or was
motivated/encouraged/pushed into publishing their website, won. Many small
businesses need the coaching and help to publish their site.

These messages obviously weren't targeted to you. It would be nice if you just
realized this and removed yourself, rather than assuming everyone is like you
and is annoyed by these emails.

I look at it this way: either I pay the website directly, or they sell my
attention/info, or they get a shot at marketing directly to me. #2 is the
worst option; for free services, then, directly marketing their upsell to me
is the only viable option.

Businesses have to make money. When you use a free service, there is a cost to
pay. I think advertising and upselling their services is a very fair option,
compared to some of the other models available.

------
cpncrunch
Worse is photobucket - they send out a similar amount of 'welcome' emails,
even AFTER you click the 'fuck off' (unsubscribe) button. They seem to have
stopped after I sent them a nasty email and reported their emails as spam.

------
timjahn
Upon first glance, this definitely seems like overkill to me. (And yes, you
could have simply hit unsubscribe and never written this blog post. But I'm
glad you did, so we can all take a look.)

I have to believe Weebly has tested this drip campaign multiple times though
and has some data behind their decision to use it.

------
na85
Wow, guys.

I think the echo-chamber that is HN has clouded some of your judgments.

Some of you are actually defending spammers.

~~~
nandemo
Spam is unsolicited email. If A gives their email address to B in order to use
B's service, and B then emails A regarding that service, AND gives A the
opportunity to unsubscribe from such emails, it's not spam.

------
gojomo
The blog post is at least as 'passive-aggressive' as the emails, as opposed to
just clicking any of the offered "stop receiving emails" links.

The concluding suggestion -- "if startups keep sending forward e-mails,
everyone loses" -- isn't well-supported. Weebly probably has data that these
messages work, and even testimony from other customers happy to be reminded
that they should finish their website.

Against that, what weight should a single peeved power user's blog post have?

~~~
minimaxir
_Against that, what weight should a single peeved power user's blog post
have?_

And therein lies the problem. There's no real consequence for aggressive
marketing, which is why the growth hacking strategies of Quora and
FounderDating [1] work. I plan to write an article about that soon.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5676189>

~~~
gojomo
This is way milder than Quora's (content-held-hostage, data-collecting)
practices. Weebly is trying to help you complete a task you started -- the
core task why anyone signs up with them -- and they make it easy to stop at
any time.

And both Weebly and Quora are milder than FounderDating's 'dark pattern' of
making it hard to realize a smarmy message will be sent out in your name,
spending your credibility to harvest more prospects.

Weebly's messages just nudge you along a path you'd already chosen, trying to
prove their worth and convert _you_ into an appreciative customer. (They're
not trying to extract extra value from your personal info or network as a non-
paying customer.) We should expect every business to do the same sort of
sales, in a forthright non-deceptive manner, until you give them a gentle
signal of disinterest.

------
SCdF
This kind of thing reminds me of guys who gets one night stands by
propositioning every single women they come across.

The end result from his perspective is that he scored. The end result from
everyone else's perspective is that he's a sleazy annoying scum-bag.

------
fredsanford
And site operators wonder why I don't sign up for things I _might_ use...

------
lopatin
The author is just interpreting effective email copy as aggressive
communication. Good copywriting persuades the user into doing some action. But
When you have no intention of doing that action, the persuasion, or pressure,
that the copy induces by trying to make you do something that you don't want
to naturally seems aggressive.

I'm not trying to justify the amount of emails that Weebly sends. That's way
too many and way too annoying. But lets face it, the content of those emails
is simply effective copywriting and the author doesn't like how it makes him
feel.

~~~
michaelt
If your copy comes across to your prospective users as aggressive and
annoying, I'm not sure I'd call that effective copywriting.

~~~
kbenson
Well, by his admission, he was using the account to help edit someone else's
site with the service. I think that places him either as someone who is no
longer a prospective user, or a type of user that falls outside their
retention and engagement processes. In either case, that doesn't really negate
the GP comment's point.

------
auctiontheory
When I look at my Inbox, emails from companies (1) who got my email address
directly from me, (2) include an unsubscribe link that doesn't require me to
"login", and (3) honor the unsubscribe request ... are the least of my
problems.

We can disagree about whether Weebly's tactics are effective (I imagine they
might be, for their target audience of less-technical users), but I don't
understand the anger. This is very minor on the scale of email "abuse" that
happens to all of us daily.

Use the unsubscribe link.

------
rthomas6
So the problem seems to be that too few emails will leave users stranded, and
too many emails will make users annoyed. As a solution, I think an approach
similar to Beeminder might be good. They use a logarithmic distribution of
emails. They send you an email every day at first (for the first 2 days), and
if you don't respond, they dial it back to once a week. If you don't respond,
they move it back to once a month or so, etc. I think the model is a good
balance.

------
crm416
To me, the problem with the 'he could have just hit unsubscribe' argument is
that there is no rational user that --wouldn't-- unsubscribe after receiving
that many emails. So either they're totally ignorant of the sheer bulk of
emails they're sending, or their strategy is to spam users until they
unsubscribe.

------
tosh
I think patio11 is spot on here. Lifecycle emails are very pragmatic. They
might be annoying to some users but in general they are a great idea.

related: <http://www.behaviormodel.org/>

"My Behavior Model shows that three elements must converge at the same moment
for a behavior to occur: Motivation, Ability, and Trigger. When a behavior
does not occur, at least one of those three elements is missing." -- BJ Fogg

=> If they signed up for your service and your market positioning/signaling is
not absolutely terrible chances are you've got people who are both motivated &
have the ability "to do" and might just need a reminder/nudge :)

Of course lifecycle emails can be optimized but I applaud Weebly for having
looked into something that so many companies don't even take the time to do.

------
d0m
Even though I agree, the author could have simply clicked the "unsubscribe" if
he wasn't interested.

------
taigeair
I used to manage community and email users (people that have signed up but may
or may not be active) and we were very careful about emailing people. I didn't
do it very frequently.

However, I don't believe it is a bad idea. People like Max fall into the group
that isn't engaged and provides no value to the company. A good strategy can
be: email him repeatedly until he either engages properly or unsubscribes. I
don't understand why he doesn't unsubscribe if it is bothering him so much.

We didn't do it because it didn't align with our branding but I don't think
it's such a bad thing.

Facebook actually emails me like crazy to add more friends on my new test
accounts.

------
pixelcort
Sometimes email robots can't take a hint.

What about the use of exponentially decaying frequencies for emailing non-
interacters (users who aren't clicking anything in the emails)?

Say an email one week later, than two, then a month, then next quarter, year,
etc.

------
ryguytilidie
This actually seems to be a very YC kinda thing, presumably because of the
extreme obsession with growth. I signed up for a vendor to check out its
features the other day and had 3 different sales people email me each of the
next 3 days asking if they could help. Another service did the same "we miss
you, you haven't been back since..." How does any of this stuff provide value
to me as a user? It genuinely seems like they don't give a shit about their
users and simply want people to visit the site so their metrics will stay up.

------
Dirlewanger
One thing in life is sure: no matter what you do, it will offend someone.
Blog's authour is an overly sensitive twit whining about business as usual.

------
yesimahuman
My guess is it works fairly well on average, and most people don't think much
about it. I wonder what patio would say about this specific case?

------
scott_karana
It's kind of hard to take this guy seriously about pushy tactics when he has
an 1140x73 "share my article" section _before_ the article.

------
andyking
I forgot I even had a Tumblr account (and can't remember why in the world I
signed-up for one) but I got an email from them the other day whose subject
line was just "Brilliant."

There was no meaningful body text, just a one-liner about "discovering great
content." For a while, I thought it was some sort of spam!

------
jmarbach
It sounds like you may just need <http://www.glider.io>

------
patrickmay
Overly attentive startup?

------
borplk
"growth hacking"

------
richardgarand
I didn't plan to spend 15 minutes today reading all the arguments on this
thread.

Therefore Hacker News is spamming me.

How can we shut down Hacker News?

------
tyang
Just use google spam filter.

------
LekkoscPiwa
So again, what's so difficult about clicking this "unsubscribe" button ?

And to post it here?

Really?

Some people do in fact have way too much time on their hands.

