I feel with you

Posted Sep 1, 2024 0:48 UTC (Sun) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325)
In reply to: I feel with you by dskoll
Parent article: A SpamAssassin surprise

IMHO the sensible option would be to stop presupposing that you can extract value from a user's "real" email address, and either paywall your content or don't. But the people who own these sites do not think as I do.

Rationale: Let's assume that you're not selling the user's email directly to spammers (because if you are, then you're one of the evil people who are causing all these problems in the first place, and I frankly don't care whether your business model makes sense or not). The only way you're (ethically) making money is if you subscribe the user to a legitimate marketing list of some kind, which presumably allows the user to unsubscribe whenever they want (because that's what "legitimate" means). You're relying entirely on the hassle hurdle, and many users are not going to play ball - when they get tired of receiving your emails, they are not going to be genteel and click "unsubscribe." Some of them are just going to click the "report spam" button (or whatever their big webmail provider calls it), and sooner or later you're going to find yourself on a denylist, probably one of the obnoxious non-public ones that email operators are always complaining about.

Of course, if you try to ask those users why they did that, a lot of them will say things like "I dunno, I just click that button when I want to stop receiving emails from somebody. Does it do anything else?"

I feel with you

Posted Sep 1, 2024 1:23 UTC (Sun) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (10 responses)

Our case was that we were a B2B business offering a free trial of our product to corporate customers, and we needed a way to contact them after the trial was over. So when they applied for the trial, we emailed them a link they could use to download the product.

I feel with you

Posted Sep 2, 2024 14:51 UTC (Mon) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link] (9 responses)

That honestly sounds less like a need and more like something your sales & marketing department wanted. You could have just offered a visible way to contact you instead to the customers who are interested in your product after the trial.

I feel with you

Posted Sep 2, 2024 16:18 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (5 responses)

That doesn't work if you want good, honest feedback.

Yes, from the customer's point of view, it might suck to be contacted after you've decided you don't want the product. But from the vendor's p-o-v, most customers will not provide feedback unless they are actually interested in the product. So how does the vendor tell the difference between the customer thinking (a) this product is crap, (b) this product doesn't fit my requirements, (c) this product is great but I can't see how we would use it, and (d) the customer employee thinking "that was a nice waste of time getting paid for doing nothing". I'm sure you can think of many others which - without the vendor being able to pro-actively reach out - would all be conflated as "prospective customer never came back".

I've been on the receiving end of that, and once I'd downloaded the pdf, I wasn't impressed. I only responded because I received a chase-up email, and politely said that on reading the pdf, it was clear it would be of no use to my in my job. But without the nice personal chase, they would have heard nothing.

Cheers,
Wol

I feel with you

Posted Sep 2, 2024 22:20 UTC (Mon) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (4 responses)

Wol, we didn't want good honest feedback. We wanted to make sales. :)

I feel with you

Posted Sep 2, 2024 22:53 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (3 responses)

But an important part of getting sales is to sell the customer what they want.

One of my friends was a very good salesman. His technique was to go in and ask "What's your problem?". He then followed up with "we have these products that look like what you're looking for".

MUCH more effective than "we have this wonder product, now what's your problem".

And even if you get the feedback "this is a lovely product. I just don't see how it's any use to me", it tells your sales guys to leave alone and don't waste effort. AND THAT CAN GET YOU SALES. On several occasions, I've gone back to a company that's treated me with respect, and taken a previous "no I'm not interested" with good grace. Because I feel I can trust them!

Cheers,
Wol

I feel with you

Posted Sep 2, 2024 23:33 UTC (Mon) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (2 responses)

What can I say? We ran the company successfully for 19 years, so our techniques worked.

I feel with you

Posted Sep 3, 2024 7:38 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

I'm not denying that. But when you chased up, and got negative feedback, I presume you spent no further effort following that prospect up?

I think you miss the point of what I'm saying - that sort of follow-up - that you were doing - is (a) great at weeding out false prospects (giving you more time to focus where you *were* likely to get results), and (b) handled properly can leave a great feeling in the prospect who is then more likely to cold-call when they see a use for your technology.

I'm not surprised the company did well. (Provided you didn't spoil it some other way :-)

Cheers,
Wol

I feel with you

Posted Sep 3, 2024 12:55 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

But when you chased up, and got negative feedback, I presume you spent no further effort following that prospect up?

It depends. Usually we did not. If the negative feedback was about the product itself, we did consider it, and if we felt the criticism was valid, we'd use it to improve the product, and let the prospect know we were doing that, if we thought they'd reevaluate.

I feel with you

Posted Sep 2, 2024 22:19 UTC (Mon) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (2 responses)

We would have lost many sales that way. Much as many people don't like to admit it, getting in touch with people partway through a trial is a very effective sales technique.

I no longer have any skin in the game (sold the companies ages ago) but do speak from experience.

I feel with you

Posted Sep 5, 2024 12:18 UTC (Thu) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link] (1 responses)

On the other hand asking for my email or "Contact us for pricing" are two of the main reasons I leave any possible interaction with your company early on before you even get a chance to convince me your product is worth consideration.

I feel with you

Posted Sep 14, 2024 11:38 UTC (Sat) by sammythesnake (guest, #17693) [Link]

I always read "Contact us for pricing" as "We assumed you'd ruin away screaming of we told you the price, so we hid it from you"...

I feel with you

Posted Sep 1, 2024 9:36 UTC (Sun) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

FWIW, this is what I have a gmail.com address for. If I think you're demanding my e-mail address for obnoxious or nefarious purposes, that's the one you get given, and I'll very happily mark any junk from you as spam. You go to a separate mailbox, where someone big handles the filtering, and you end up on a non-public denylist at Google if you can't be bothered to avoid being obnoxious having demanded my e-mail address.