
Marketing automation is getting out-of-hand - adriand
http://factore.ca/blog/435-marketing-automation-is-getting-out-of-hand
======
Terretta
It's not "getting" out of hand. This exact mass personalized campaign style
has been around since before the Internet.

I managed IT at a printing press where we used letterpress printing on cotton
rag paper to "type" "personal" letters to lists of a million people. We
"signed" the letters in different ink. We paid extra for first class stamps
instead of postage meter.

And, we would send up to five letters in a series each referring to the one
before, and by the last letter, we printed yellow highlighter over key sell
phrases and 'wrote' in the margins with different colored ink to say this is
the stuff that really matters to you.

These campaigns were deadly effective.

~~~
hypertexthero
I recently received one of these letters (a 'happy holidays' postcard) from
Chewy.com with postage stamps on the envelope, written and signed with what
looked like real color marker pens, and my respect for the company immediately
dropped.

I can see how it probably works with many people, but it doesn't change the
fact that it is at best deceitful, at worse a lie.

~~~
paulddraper
Advertising is always "deceitful". That guy didn't get ripped using stretchy
band, no one is that happy when drinking Pepsi, and a new phone won't change
your worldview.

~~~
ygtthyhgf
I for one can attest that there are times when I'm feeling down and some large
drinks from a pepsi does make me happy. I get a high from it. I believe it is
the gas bubbles that give you that rush.

~~~
inimino
Not the sugar and caffeine? You can switch to seltzer then.

------
noahmbarr
(full disclosure we, and most scaled Enterprise SaaS organizations, use these
tools)

This is probably NOT marketing automation (Marketo, Eloqua, or HubSpot) you're
coming up against, it's a new class of tools that run "playbooks" via
moderately sophisticated mail merged email campaigns. It's an effort to
automate and/or optimize what junior sales staff (often called Sales or
Business Development Representatives) do.

Some of those tools include Outreach.io, Salesloft, and Toutapp. It could also
be a home brewed app firing these emails.

These are designed to seem like a person wrote those emails to you, but really
they are running on a schedule and logic, listening for pixel loads, link
clicks, and/or your response. If you don't respond, they can respond to
themselves after X business days/hours, etc. They are being optimized for
conversion, and some even have A/B testing built in.

Coupled with outsourced labor or scrapers focused on picking up on signals and
populating a specific field to be mail merged (in OP's case, a title from a
job posting), some of these things literally run themselves. Generally, you
get a human when you respond back -- as the algorithms aren't smart enough
[yet] to respond back appropriately.

Hope this clears it up. I hate being on the other side of these things too. If
you get one and want it to stop, either click the CAN-SPAM opt out or briskly
respond accordingly.

~~~
snowwrestler
> If you get one and want it to stop, either click the CAN-SPAM opt out or
> briskly respond accordingly

I think a major point of annoyance is that these emails often do not have opt-
out links, to preserve the illusion that they are personal emails.

~~~
AdamSC1
In that case you can report them to the FTC.

Under CAN-SPAM they must:

-[Have] A visible and operable unsubscribe mechanism is present in all emails.

-Honor all opt-out requests within 10 days.

Failure to provide either of those on any automated business email is a
violation of the act. A number of these startups (and tools) are in violation
of the act with this 'illusion'.

------
jerkstate
My wife got one of these ads from a car dealership. It was made to look like
an Outlook email printout from a sales rep at another dealership addressed to
the guy who had sold her car to her. The email stated that the dealership had
an interested buyer for that particular model year (about 5 years old) and
that hers was the only one in the area. They said that if she came in, they
would give her a free oil change and offer her above market rates for a trade
in. The printout had what looked like a hand-written post-it stuck to it
asking her to get ahold of the sales rep in question. I was suspicious but she
followed up and found that the sales rep who had supposedly sent the email was
not even a real person. It was a pretty advanced scheme to try to cover up the
fact that it was just a way to get her into the shop, inspect her car, and
find all sorts of problems with it and pressure her into trading it in.
Probably the scummiest thing I've seen in a long time.

~~~
FussyZeus
I get something you could consider worse: letters designed explicitly to look
like communications from the DMV. I got an absolute DELUGE of these about a
year ago from various companies wanting to sell me auto warranties. Phone
calls too along the same lines: very official sounding, no company name given,
just to contact some person.

The letters were downright devious. The company letterhead was designed
specifically to look at a glace like the state official emblem, the contents
were all white paper, no photoshopped images (cheaper to produce and more
accurate to the real deal, win win I guess) and the marketing materials were
designed to look like pre-filled official forms, except when you actually read
it you realized it was application for that bloody warranty.

I can't fucking believe it's legal to send shit like that. You're two steps
from impersonating the Government. I could totally see someone a little
further on in years (or just not paying attention!) thinking they had to
respond.

~~~
blockchan
> You're two steps from impersonating the Government

In Poland it's normal practice. You register a company, you get serious
looking email from private companies which names are very similar to related
government entity which tells you to pay for registration (which is free).
It's going on for years, no consequences for them.

The same about golden and silver coins, gold plated religious stuff - company
called freaking "NATIONAL TREASURY" aimed to look like national mint sells
this shit for years.

~~~
jerkstate
I registered a business entity in California and there's a company in
Sacramento that does that. They send you a letter asking you to pay them a
large fee to file your officer report (which you have to do anyways, but the
real fee is much lower). It's all very official government looking paperwork
with a government sounding name and an address in Sacramento. I was nearly
fooled until I looked it up online.

~~~
FussyZeus
So they impersonate a state agency to collect a real fee but then overcharge
for it like they're doing you a favor? How is this crap legal?

------
anigbrowl
This post describes how I've felt for many years. Marketing _is_ an important
function of business - otherwise one could easily go broke waiting for people
discover on their own what great goods or services a business has to offer. In
a busy marketplace, getting and keeping buyers' attention is a necessary first
step to developing a business relationship.

But a _lot_ of marketing people seem to think that the best way to do this is
to annoy potential or existing customers, so that their employer's brand will
always come to mind first, even if it is tainted with somewhat negative
feelings about the product. In one way, I don't blame them - that technique is
empirically proven to work, marketing people want to meet their targets, get
paid, and go home like everyone else does, and the uncertain nature of
business communication makes it difficult to adjust to the information
preferences of each individual consumer.

But in another way, I do blame them, for two reasons. One, because they are
deliberately choosing to clutter up people's lives with unwanted solicitations
of attention, often despite specifically being asked not to. One thing I
really miss about living in the Netherlands is that the post office there
gives you stickers you can put on your mail box/slot to indicate whether you
are willing to accept different kinds of commercial mail, both generic and
personal.

Two, because a great deal of marketing material goes beyond a solicitation and
description of goods and services and into bullshit and deception. Almost
every marketing professional I've ever met seems to think that some dishonesty
in commercial matters is OK. It's understandable, as they're partly backed by
a legal system that historically regards many false claims in advertising as
'mere puffery' \- essentially saying that because consumers are exposed to a
lot of bullshit anyway, it's OK to bullshit them.

I disagree, and the greater the degree of bullshit I receive from any given
business, the more likely I am to retaliate against them in some fashion, by
adding them to spam lists, badmouthing them within my social circle, or
occasionally responding with bullshit communications of my own designed to
waste their time - followed up with helpful comparisons to their own marketing
materials so they understand that deception doesn't pay.

~~~
amelius
> Marketing is an important function of business

But it is dysfunctional, or even anti-functional, for the economy. Because
with advertisements we're not buying the "best" product, but rather the one
with the biggest associated marketing budget.

It undermines the most important merit of capitalism.

~~~
snowwrestler
This is a popular sentiment on HN but I think it is mistaken.

First of all, who gets to determine what is "best"? You? The relativity of
perceived product value makes it hard to prove that people are buying the
"wrong" things. The whole point of markets is that it is impossible to
determine in advance what people really want.

If what you said were true, the biggest marketing budget would always win, but
it doesn't--far from it. The economy is littered with the wasted marketing
budgets of failed products.

~~~
Gustomaximus
David Olgily has a great quote on this: "Great marketing only makes a bad
product fail faster"

~~~
amelius
This quote might as well be false.

(In fact, most quotes are a form of marketing, not for products but for
ideas.)

------
kazagistar
Welcome to the zero sum endgame of the global economy. As real innovation
slows, markets become a zero sum game, with everyone competing to push their
"differentiated" brand on a finite consumer base. If improving your products
is too hard, all you have to do is spend more on tricking the consumers into
buying it. Except once everyone figures it out, the war escalates, getting
more scummy and deceptive with each iteration. At least it means we won't run
out of jobs for people; once there is no more engineering to be done, everyone
will eventually work in some outlet of sales and marketing.

------
ardeay
Here is a pull quote from an article that published today

"As People Get Weary of Sales Automation, Direct Sales Contacts Prevail

The email automation era is becoming very easy to spot, and it’s happening
everywhere. Multiple emails like this land in our inboxes on a daily basis.
This robotic tactic may even begin to harm a brand’s reputation.

Sales people will go back to being people and will personalize an email or
pick up the damn phone. The excitement of automation in the digital era will
also make people realize that they like to talk to people"

[http://www.cmswire.com/digital-marketing/marketing-trends-
sh...](http://www.cmswire.com/digital-marketing/marketing-trends-shaping-the-
year-to-come/)

Seemed relevant ;)

~~~
double0jimb0
Content marketing, yay!

~~~
ardeay
srs :)

------
kurthr
I wish they would stop calling this Marketing, and call it Advertising or
Sales... or just call it Spam.

Yes, I know that Push Marketing and Marketing Automation is a thing and that
they probably originally chose the words because they didn't have such a
negative connotation (that's good marketing!), but what does this really have
to do with a market? I am not a market... just an unwilling product being
packaged and sold.

------
legitster
I'm actually a Marketing Automation Specialist, and I would like to clear up
that this is _not_ marketing automation. These are just canned emails. The
fact that they use email automation systems for them is silly as I can pretty
much do the same thing with an Excel spreadsheet and a mail merge.

Usually these emails are the result a sales-focused organization being
oversold on a marketing platform and trying to put it to good use the only way
they know how: buying lists and sending them unsolicited emails.

But marketing automation in general is much more all-encompassing and you
shouldn't necessarily mind it when done well. More and more it doesn't even
involve email.

~~~
CrackpotGonzo
What are you currently working on? Always curious about fellow marketing
automation people.

~~~
legitster
Experimenting with creating a _very_ rudimentary internal API to handle some
unique lead processing.

Also, web personalization, but we are not very happy with the product we are
using and are trying to work out some kinks.

~~~
maxerickson
Do you foresee identifying people who hate targeted advertising and pulling
back the amount of messaging they get?

It actually seems to be the case already, but I dream of the day where the
facial recognition system in the store turns on a little red light on the cash
register, notifying the cashier that I'm going to respond negatively.

~~~
legitster
We kind of do that already. We identify user groups that have low response
rates and cull them automatically, or put them on a lower frequency program.
Good, quality leads are expensive and you don't want to completely burn them
out.

We also have built-in stopgaps that limit the amount of emails people get.
Nobody gets more than x per unit of time, the ratio of which we are always
trying to push down.

------
SixSigma
This reminds me of a personal experience.

I used to work for a programming startup, we all worked from home and logged
into an IRC channel to communicate.

People would come and go and you;d have the rounds of "hello", "good morning",
"how are you today" etc. so I wrote an IRC hello_bot to do it for me, made a
list of my typical greetings and that all was good. It only ran when I was
logged in so if more interaction was required, I was on hand.

Eventually our Sales Manager worked out it was a bot and got really angry,
while the tech people (everyone but him) thought it was a cool and fun thing.
He didn't appreciate that my bot to say hello to him probably took me more
effort to get right than I ever put into actually saying hello.

It was a good lesson to me.

(later we found he had been skimming money off the top of contracts, rippig us
off for thousands and the company ceased trading, I'm not sure if that's
related :)

------
20years
I think good marketing automation is very specific to the phase the user is in
and doesn't even always involve email. For example, if a user signed up to
your SaaS and started the process but didn't finish, an email guiding them how
to finish or asking if they need help in that step can be helpful. Or if a
shopper added a product to their cart but didn't check out, a remarketing ad
showcasing that product with a promo may remind and entice them.

So many are just pushing out generic mass emails every 3 days and calling it
marketing automation. That is not marketing automation, that is spam.

~~~
username223
> a remarketing ad showcasing that product with a promo may remind and entice
> them.

Is there a part of you that is still human? If your "user" didn't buy the
thing, that may be because that human decided he didn't want it. Pestering him
("reminding" or "enticing") may shove him farther down your sales funnel, but
don't pretend it's anything but hostile.

~~~
gk1
"Hostile" is taking it a bit far. If the "reminder" ad wasn't there, then you
would just be seeing some other (less relevant) ad.

~~~
username223
No, I wouldn't -- blocking web spam is pretty easy, and I crack down hard on
companies that send me email spam (your "reminders," and everything else from
your domain, go straight to the trash). If I have decided that I don't want to
buy your thing, you should respect my decision.

~~~
20years
I think you may only be seeing things from your own point of view. The % of
people that click and complete purchases from these re-marketing ads when they
are done correctly is huge. Oftentimes in the 80% range when done correctly.
When someone places something in a shopping cart but then leaves without
finishing the purchase, that shows intent. There are a lot of things that
could have interrupted that purchase. Reminding them about it and even
offering a % off promo is very effective and many people appreciate it.

Yeah when done poorly, it can be ineffective and overbearing but I think that
is the case with a lot of things that are done poorly.

------
excalibur
All automation is out-of-hand by definition.

------
Florin_Andrei
> _They try to play on the recipient 's sense of courtesy. They look like an
> actual email, and it really feels rude not to reply._

Nope. Not anymore.

That used to be the case, I don't know, 10 years ago? But in these days of the
spampocalypse, not replying to emails feels about as rude as stepping on ants
on the sidewalk.

Sorry, but my time is literally the only non-renewable resource I have.

~~~
StanislavPetrov
Sending an unsolicited email solicitation is rude. Refusing to reply to an
unsolicited email is not rude.

~~~
ommunist
Thing is, the guy signed into LinkedIN ToS, opening himself for this vector of
attack, ehm... voluntarily.

------
Animats
SpamAssassin is discarding almost all of those for me. I just looked in the
reject folder, and there are hundreds of such messages, all rejected. If
you're seeing those, your spam filtering is inadequate. Are those getting
through Gmail's filters? If they are, Google is slipping.

~~~
yborg
>Google is slipping Or maybe Google is monetizing. Trusting an advertising
company to not forward you advertising is somewhat naive.

~~~
Animats
Google apparently does now have a whitelisting program for bulk senders.
AcceptEmail claims to be whitelisted.[1]

[1] [https://www.acceptemail.com/us/blog/acceptemail-
authorized-b...](https://www.acceptemail.com/us/blog/acceptemail-authorized-
by-google-for-use-of-action-buttons)

------
dkarapetyan
Soon automated marketing will be getting responses from customer proxies and
we will achieve the singularity.

On a more serious note I think the article points out something that
automation erases. This person wants a genuine interaction instead of a
simulacrum of a human interaction.

Hamming has a great lecture series where he consistently re-iterates the point
of human/machine interactions as a symbiotic relationship where the machines
augment and enhance human qualities instead of just substituting for them.
Norbert Weiner before him says the same things at the dawn of cybernetics and
information theory. There is much potential in these machine enhanced systems
but it seems like it is all being squandered.

------
cmac2992
I think you'd be surprised to hear that a lot of these emails aren't
automated. Templatized definitely. automated, maybe.

Fortune 500 companies employee fleets of just out of college marketing majors
to do just this sort of thing.

------
snotrockets
I've made a very simple software that tags such emails, and generates an
automated reply back. From the response I get, I suspect the marketers don't
realize I'm using tools similar to theirs.

~~~
dilemma
Hilarious. I think there's a market for your product.

------
kumarski
I don't think so.

Companies often die because they don't send enough emails, not the other way
around. Fallibility is your own worst enemy in a startup, and email outbound
is one way to kill it faster.

That being said, there should only be one follow up.

There's only 2 reasons that have high response rates for messaging people
outbound.

1\. They want to make you famous and build a relationship with you. In which
case you should respond. I always advise this as the best method for building
customer relationships. Just setup a blog and reach out to them asking to
interview them about what they do. Only after the outbound company knows the
candidate, should they discuss the mechanics of their businesses and if they
can help eachother.

2\. If there's deep timing context. (Saw you just raised, saw you in the
press, etc...)

3\. (This one is really tough, but if you're very high profile, you can just
reach out.)

Everything else is likely low response/open rate.

------
colinbartlett
I get so many of these, that upon receiving the first one, I just immediately
setup a filter to move everything from that sender into the Trash. They never
have an "unsubscribe" and they are always followed by a series of ever more
desperate messages, so that's really the only way to keep them out of my
inbox.

------
ommunist
In response for protection of automated marketing emails, can you think about
such a bot as an extension of account holder persona? Many know how polite and
honest are talent seekers from recruiting business, so does their bots. If we
expose ourselves in social networks, we are automatically becoming targets for
aggressive manipulation, nothing strange. FB, LinkedIN, they never considered
you and I personas. We are goods, that has to be handled, resold and
generating profits. Psychology behind modern recruiting business does not
differ much from that of slave acquisition. And there is nothing wrong with
it. Except one thing. Abolitionists could have saved you from slavery, but no
one can save you from automated marketing unless you delete yourself from the
Internet.

------
davidgerard
How can we impose an automated, scalable cost on this sort of marketing? Or,
calling it what it is, spam.

~~~
anchpop
Someone had the idea that the one sending the emails should be the one hosting
them, not the one receiving them. The cost would be insignificant for most
people but people who send a huge amount of emails would have to pay
significantly more than they do today

~~~
greenshackle2
Another idea is proof-of-work systems - the sender has to prove that they've
performed some work. hashcash is an example, where to sender has to compute a
hash with certain properties, and use is as a 'stamp'.

You'd need a whitelist system along with it, else legitimate lists with large
subscription bases would get hit hard.

------
Negative1
Very much agree. I get a ton of these personalized emails that go something
like "Hey it's Joe from Startup A, thanks for using our product. Reach out and
provide some feedback...". My first instinct is to reply back, thinking this
is a real human attempting to connect. Then I realize it's a con. It's sad but
I'm much less trustful now when I receive an email from someone I don't know.
It just shouldn't be that way but these lazy marketers are preying on human
generosity and decency and when you discover this it just leaves the worst
taste in your mouth.

------
prawn
I receive loads of these sorts of emails, but one recent one stood out. They
had a script that looked up my location, automatically found a restaurant
nearby and randomly picked a dish from the menu. The email then attempted to
make small-talk about how this individual had once dined at said restaurant
and enjoyed said dish. And it might've been remotely convincing had they not
used such halting language and brackets around the inserts implying they were
variables in a script.

There's automating general messaging, and then there's automating
"personalised" smalltalk.

------
Spooky23
Marketing is always a pain in the ass.

One persistent Salesdude actually figured out where I ate breakfast and showed
up there to run into me once.

The email version is easier to deal with. It's moderately annoying,but really
no big deal.

~~~
Gustomaximus
Marketing <> Sales

It's kinda like a designer and developer. People who only see IT work from a
distance may feel they are 'people who make websites' but there is a entirely
different skillset and method difference, but there can be some crossover and
they combine well together.

~~~
Spooky23
As a target of a lot of both marketing and sales, from my pov they are
merging.

These super targeted email and phone campaigns are more like a sales process.
Marketing traditionally was about educating with propaganda and matching
problem with solution for lead generation. Now there's more attempts to
actually sell!

On the sales side, the old school salespeople who were really there to build
relationships and solve problems are a dying breed. Modern salespeople are
hamsters on some micromanaged CRM wheel, even from big companies.

~~~
davidivadavid
Direct marketing isn't exactly new. Whether your consider it marketing or
sales is kind of an academic debate, but that overlap has always existed (how
could it not?).

------
kilroy123
I have a simple solution for this. I create a gmail filter that looks for the
word "Unsubscribe" in it. If so, it skips my inbox, and is in a special
folder.

My inbox is a real inbox with emails that are real.

~~~
al_chemist
You may want to reread the article. It's about messages without "Unsubscribe"
link.

------
JeremyMorgan
The biggest issue with this for me is the signal to noise ratio is getting too
hard to determine. I don't want to ignore a real human reaching out to me for
something, but I often do. And for recruiting purposes it's really bad (I'm
sure many of you face this). I don't want to just ignore a true recruiter who
would like to talk to me about a position, but answering every single spammed
out email is out of the question.

------
banku_brougham
Nobody has mentioned the movie 'Her' yet, so I will. Don't get caught up in
being personally offended, I say imagine the evolution that leads to the point
where you not only feel that initial warm acceptance of personal interest, but
continues as you go deeper and receive recognition, understanding, even love.

------
tomcam
I am a polite person but I decided years ago to ignore these. My reasoning is
that if it's truly urgent they will figure out how to get through the email
noise, and if it's a friend they can just text or tweet or call me.

I sleep fine at night.

------
rf1331
The emails work, it's how business gets done. Live with it or don't use email.

------
sharemywin
Unless there is something personal in them I ignore them after the first line
or two.

------
barrkel
Who replies to unsolicited marketing email even if it's from real people and
not templates? If we rewarded that behaviour, everybody would do it - and it
would destroy email's utility. So I ignore them one and all.

~~~
arkitaip
Don't just ignore, mark them as spam, especially if you're using Gmail or
another big email provider as this will train their spam filters.

------
username223
> Here's an example from LinkedIn. This is the fifth email I have received
> from this "person".

If you still receive any email from @linkedin.com, you need to fix your spam
filter so that no longer happens.

------
andrewfromx
has the author watched HBO Westworld? Aren't we learning that a bot and a
human BOTH have feelings. "People are designing their email automation
templates to play on the sense of obligation and even guilt of their
recipients, even though no obligation or guilt should be felt, since you're
not getting emails from a human being, you're getting emails from a bot." This
is so anti bot! no obligation or guilt should be felt is exactly what the evil
do-ers in Westworld do to hosts.

------
revicon
Do your part and mark these as spam. If enough of us do it, the emails will
stop, either because they're in spam now or the marketers learn better.

------
uptown
Anyone have success with Unroll.me? Wish there was a way to use it without
handing over access to my email account.

~~~
e1g
I used unroll.me several times, and every time it helped to reduce the inbound
end of the email funnel. Because of privacy concerns, now I just search for
"unsubscribe", and go through the process manually - this catches >90% of
automated emails and takes 2 minutes to clean up the inbox.

------
settsu
The author's own website uses automated "chat" that appears to be initiated by
a real person.

------
WhitneyLand
Many of these do not have a CANSPAM unsubscribe, as the author pointed out.

How is this legal and not a violation of CANSPAM?

~~~
beejiu
If it is anything like the law in the UK, there is probably an exemption for
B2B business communications. (I.e. the law protects consumers not businesses.)

------
zeveb
For some reason the entire article consists of lines collapsed on top of one
another. Very odd.

------
soared
These emails are only a touch worse than corporate blogs that look like
personal blogs. If this was on a personal blog it would be genuine, but
finishing this post only to see a call to action and marketing speak at the
bottom really counters his point.

------
pascalxus
Don't hate on the email outreach because it's automated. If your going to hate
it, do so for sincere reasons: namely that you're not interested in their
services. And, if you are interested and you reply, then you should be
grateful they reached out to you.

I wouldn't mind an automated message if they had something I really really
wanted. The problem is, 99.9999% of the time, automated message or non-
automated messages aren't offering me anything I actually want.

Case in point: if an automated message offered you a mansion in your
neighborhood for sale, at 200$, would you really be upset that the message was
automated?

~~~
jodrellblank
_Don 't hate on the email outreach because it's automated. If your going to
hate it, do so for sincere reasons: namely that you're not interested in their
services_

But that's not the sincere reason why I hate it. The sincere reason is because
there's one of me and millions of companies all thinking they have a right to
my attention so I can give their offer a genuine consideration.

If I do see an offer and don't want it, I'm not hating on that specific offer
that I didn't want.

I am hating on the way the overall system tends towards me spending 24/7
reading advertising with a limitless queue of advertising backlog, and
marketers defending it saying it's legitimate because they, individually, need
to do marketing to survive.

