You Should Probably Send More Email Than You Do

Articles like this always bring out the part of HN that simply <i>can not understand normal people</i>.<p>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.<p>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.

I have <i>no idea</i> 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.<p>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.<p>1. Read everything he writes about helping people make money. Automating SEO, split testing and now email marketing (<a href="http://startupbook.net" rel="nofollow">http://startupbook.net</a> by Rob Walling is also mostly about email marketing).<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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".<p>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. <i>conversion parity</i> 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.<p>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 <i>increase</i> they see in revenue.

Sadly, I think Patrick's going to receive a lot of <i>but I don't like receiving email</i> -type responses from people here who just don't want to understand that they personally do not represent the average computer user.<p>It's an important point: just because you personally don't like something doesn't mean that everybody else is the same.<p>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 <i>at any price</i>!

&#62; <i>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.</i><p>But isn't the phrase "You <i>shouldn't</i> judge a book by its cover"? (And even when "can't" is used, what's meant is often "shouldn't").<p>Of course people judge books by their cover; they also judge people by the clothes they wear, their height or skin color. Should they?<p>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).<p>&#62; <i>99% of geeks will report never having buying anything as a result of an email</i><p><i>bought</i> (just to show that I read at least this far!)

About email, what I feel is that:<p>- 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<p>- 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.

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".<p>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.

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.<p>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.

"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.)"<p>Would now be a good time to ask for details?

Hard to disagree with this statement: most people read all their email<p>And: most people miss most of their feeds/blog posts<p>Which is the incentive for true spam, but if you have something useful to tell your associates and customers, you aren't spam right?

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.<p>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".<p>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.<p>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.

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).<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.

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

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.<p>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.<p>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.

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

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.

<i>&#62; (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><p>I'd be very interested in hearing that bit.

Sorry Patrick, you couldn't be more wrong.<p>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.<p>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.<p>On the other hand I dread getting an email newsletter. Most are deleted or marked as spam on sight.<p>You know that emails are worth less too, or you wouldn't need to bribe with great content.<p>I realise I am not the average user, but the average user doesn't need to know how to improve his software either...

Best thing I learned from this? "Please confirm that you want that free video and other emails from me" is a <i>much</i> better subject line than the standard "Confirm subscription".

"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."<p>This is satire, right?

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).<p>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."<p>How many of you clicked and signed up?<p>edit: Several people downvoted me (fair enough) but did anyone sign up to the guy's link?<p>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?