> we found that none of these “styles” really resonated much with devs. Open rates were low, many marked us as <i>spam</i><p>Spam:<p>1. (uncountable, rarely countable, computing, Internet) Unsolicited bulk electronic messages.<p>2. (uncountable, computing, Internet) Any undesired electronic content automatically generated for commercial purposes<p>[<a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/spam" rel="nofollow">https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/spam</a>]<p>If many people marked you as spam, maybe that's because the messages you were sending were exactly that: spam?
My reaction to all marketing emails is one or more of:<p>- Delete<p>- Flag sender as spammer in Thunderbird.<p>- Click unsubscribe link.<p>- File abuse complaint with sending service.<p>I have never bought anything in response to a marketing email.
It's not an issue of the template that you use or the CTAs that you include. These emails are always useless noise. I don't need a welcome message from the CEO or check-ins to solicit feedback.<p>Spend less time on marketing and more time making your product good.
Been getting some lately that sound like breakups / suicide notes.<p>Subjects:<p>“Don’t Delete”<p>“Goodbye” (received today!)<p>“I’ll take this as you don’t want to speak to me”<p>“Can you help? I’m so sorry”<p>Tech sales getting real desperate!
The examples, casual or not, are automated but are missing "unsubscribe" links. Perhaps they are just cropped out from the screenshots, but if they're indeed missing, that's a "Report Spam" for me.
I specifically dislike it when they sent emails persistently with content along the line of "Maybe you have not seen my previous email?"<p>The second reason that I do a report-spam is when google cannot automatically unsubscribe and a browser tab opens and I should type an email address and confirm.<p>The worst are the ones that send back a confirmation that I have unsubscribed.<p>There are some pretty big names in oss with enterprise offerings that are doing this kind of communication.
I have a close friend who I won't name. He has a note on his LinkedIn that says "I will never buy anything from you if you call me or email me without you asking" with a list showing the people and companies that have screwed up.<p>I have literally seen him talk to someone and be like "hey, check my linked in again" just to have them react to their name and company being on the list. You don't need to market to developers, a good product only needs three things: what it costs, documentation that is usable and code snippets I can run my preferred language.<p>Your email campaign is rarely ever going to help me unless the email specifically tells me what you're product does for me and doesn't include any bullshit marketing or other whitepaper crap.
My mail server has a great script: all emails that are not encrypted with my PGP pubkey are automatically deleted. It's so nice to sort out all the useless broadcasting.<p>Hopefully one day I will be important enough to afford to activate this script.
I actually really dislike when the From field is "John Cooper Smith" and I cannot tell at a glance it's from a specific company... I may want to look, I may not... but having to go in just makes me want to unsub. FTR, I keep and do look at a few of the misc marketing emails a month. Far from all.. and once a quarter I'll spend part of a day specifically unsubscribing.
Interesting insight into the life of a spam writer.<p>I despise SaaS companies that funnel me into some kind of 30 day email journey when I’m just registering with things my company uses.
It's rather amusing how obvious it is that one of these ever look at their plain-text email, while going to exteme lengths to "style" their email. Also the fact that their "few links" are about 2k chars long each, with CRM tracking whatevers, so one have zero idea what the actual url is.<p>Keeping chaning your from address is an excelent way to you getting your enire domain spamlisted instead of just the one sender.
This is a step in the right direction - providing contentful and relevant update emails instead of pure marketing fluff.<p>The initial intro emails feel a bit unnecessary for me though - sending docs links etc that way just feels redundant, as if I have gotten to that point I've already been skimming your docs.
I'd use a service where I give it a dollar every time I get a marketing email and at the end of the year it makes a top-10-annoyers list and spends the money making life hell for the annoyers.<p>You don't get heard in HN threads, you get heard by hurting their bottom line.
I suspect there is a lesson not learned here, which is that asking developers for product reviews can backfire. We're a rather blunt group when it comes to product feedback.<p>See the other comments here for examples of this reality.
This is easy: have something that is worth reading.<p>I don't mind email and I have used my technical skills to organize it well, so I can get ten times the efficiency out of it I otherwise would.
The problem is Marketing departments are typically ran by boomers who want these things cranked out. Easy goals for them, they're not graded on the performance past open rates.
Don't just flipping don't. I don't like getting obnoxious emails from people I've never heard of. It pisses me off when I get random emails because you forced me to provide an email address to read your documentation. Here's my advice for email marketing to a developer just flipping don't.