Email Marketing to Developers

&gt; 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:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wiktionary.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;spam" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wiktionary.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;spam</a>]<p>If many people marked you as spam, maybe that&#x27;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&#x27;s not an issue of the template that you use or the CTAs that you include. These emails are always useless noise. I don&#x27;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 &#x2F; 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 &quot;unsubscribe&quot; links. Perhaps they are just cropped out from the screenshots, but if they&#x27;re indeed missing, that&#x27;s a &quot;Report Spam&quot; for me.

I specifically dislike it when they sent emails persistently with content along the line of &quot;Maybe you have not seen my previous email?&quot;<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&#x27;t name. He has a note on his LinkedIn that says &quot;I will never buy anything from you if you call me or email me without you asking&quot; with a list showing the people and companies that have screwed up.<p>I have literally seen him talk to someone and be like &quot;hey, check my linked in again&quot; just to have them react to their name and company being on the list. You don&#x27;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&#x27;re product does for me and doesn&#x27;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&#x27;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.

Many devs disable images, especially to professional accounts precisely to avoid tracking pixels, phishing, etc.

I actually really dislike when the From field is &quot;John Cooper Smith&quot; and I cannot tell at a glance it&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;s rather amusing how obvious it is that one of these ever look at their plain-text email, while going to exteme lengths to &quot;style&quot; their email. Also the fact that their &quot;few links&quot; 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.

&gt; send them to the docs<p>&gt; But then they’ll get lost<p><i>that means your docs are bad</i>

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&#x27;ve already been skimming your docs.

I&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;re not graded on the performance past open rates.

Don&#x27;t just flipping don&#x27;t. I don&#x27;t like getting obnoxious emails from people I&#x27;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&#x27;s my advice for email marketing to a developer just flipping don&#x27;t.