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this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2023
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Asklemmy
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Professional marketer here, all of the unsub rates in this thread look nominal (0.1-0.2%).
Also, when we run third party distribution campaigns, a large amount of people, I can look at their hotjar journey and watch in real time their mouse movements as they download a whitepaper, then we call them and they say they never downloaded it.
It's a mix of lying to the annoying marketing company (I get it), and just plain forgetting you did it.
I switched from Hearthstone Deck Tracker to Firestone Deck Tracker yesterday, I'm not entirely sure if I checked to see I wasn't signing up for marketing emails, it's that easy.
Not to mention, I can buy just about any non-EU email address i want on demand.
That such a marketplace exists is a major annoyance.
But good to know that there's a line between that and EU mails. Glad the EU legislated that away.
This shit pisses me off. If I'm forced to enter my e-mail address to download a white paper, that should not be considered consent to spam me. My company gates our whitepapers behind e-mail/personal details as well. I just put in my marketing team's personal contact info when I have to download something from our own website. Make them eat their own shit.
thats funny but if you gave me a real name and a fake email, it gets run through data normalization and I'd likely get your real email.
If you just give me the company name, fake name and email, it's possible that if you met our qualification procedure, we'd just dig out the best looking person at the company (head of department, procurement manager, vice president?) and start contacting them based on "institutional buying intent."
I'm sure you don't care, hear it all the time, and/or have no authority to change things, but this is shitty behavior on your industry's part. Just leave people alone!
Edit: I do appreciate you sharing these insights with all of us!
I mean I'm emailing you twice a week at your work email address for 6 weeks about a product to help you with reducing costs on a certain business function, and making sure you see ads for my company when you would see ads for a different company, and someone pays me money to do it.
I dont touch any personal emails, so I don't really consider it immoral to email you about your job at your job.
But I'm not giving you explicit consent to spam me??? You're gating content behind me giving up an e-mail address and then pretending like that's consent. Or worse, going and buying my e-mail from someone else. This is the part I find immoral.
And you're being disingenuous here. You're not "e-mailing me about my job", you're spamming lame brochures that I never explicitly consented to receiving. Whether you think that's immoral or not, don't attempt to rephrase it as if it's some great service you're doing me.
Edit:
I don't want you to e-mail me at all, but oh. my. god. one e-mail is enough. I don't need 11 more! Wtf?
Thanks. I find the gall of some people surprising. Thats why I always use „hide my email“ and some random names for things that I don’t intend on using like one time signups for whitepapers. These people are indoctrinated to put money over people. You wont change them but you can just act in bad faith as they do.
You are giving me explicit consent, though, as payment for downloading a whitepaper. Your options are to opt out at point of sign up, or at any point after that, or, of course, not download the paper
Or if you've been prospected, I have to maintain a reason for emailing you in the CRM, and I'd invite you to consider the ramifications of "businesses can't contact other businesses." What if you need your windows cleaned? Or your fleet vehicles need to have their tires checked? Or you need a new warehouse to expand your business?
You personally in your every day role may not want that, but businesses, in general, do.
I am emailing you about your job if you are in charge of expensive ($10MM+) software applications and are interested in downsizing your compute and storage costs. Are you those things? If you are a CDAO of a billion dollar company, you probably would like to consider the product I work for.
You don't understand the word "explicit" do you? Unless I check a box that says "please send me bullshit", I am not explicitly giving you consent to send me bullshit. You're also not giving me an option to pay for the whitepaper to avoid being sent bullshit.
The ramifications are that your shitty industry dies over night, and I'm okay with it.
Okay, now I've lost respect for you as a person. If I need any of that I'm going to ask my peers for references because I trust references way more than some jackass sending me the same e-mail 12 times over 6 weeks. If I can't get references, them I'm going to use a search engine. Did you forget that exists?
But for all your bragging about being able to drill down and locate very specific individuals, none of you drill down and search by "this person in particular NEVER responds positively to spam". So until you start doing that, I'm affected by your immoral practices and I get an opinion too, whether you like my opinion or not.
We're having a conversation about your industry in general. Not whatever goalpost you move the conversation to.
It's clear to me from this conversation that your industry is not able to morally justify themselves and instead of owning your shitty behavior you have convinced yourselves that you're doing people a service. You are not good people. :(
Also, I did notice you conveniently ignoring my comments on sending 12 freaking e-mails. I'd love to see you justify that nonsense.
You don't need to lose respect for people who are brainwashed by capitalism. They don't know better because it's normalised for them all the time. If you berate them, it won't make them change their ways or see that they're doing harm.
Mailing people out of the blue is probably a good way to get new customers. How else will people know? SEO is always tricky, advertisements are often blocked, calling a company or sending some mails might get better results. However, twelve mails is clearly overdoing it and there should be a functioning opt out button even out of those mails.
I guess a better way would be to go to conferences of your target demographic, but that would require effort.
in this hypothetical, you did. It doesn't specifically say the word "bullshit" but it does give you an opt-out, both on the sign up and the thank you page, and in the immediate bounce back confirmation and in every subsequent email.
supply chain software? have you considered that everything you've purchased in the last 25 years at least was monitored by supply chain software?
you personally know the owner of several fleet maintenance companies? What if there's a better fleet maintenance company that you don't know that would be better for your company? I fail to see how "ask someone you know" works at the scale of billion dollar businesses.
I'm afraid your mistaken, that is one of the factors the aforementioned software can segment based on, plus we report on it too
then I'm afraid we're talking cross-purposes. I am talking specifically about my process and experiences. You may personally hate all marketing, but I think a more realistic take is that taking products to market is an essential part of the economy
im not saying I'm saving lives, I'm saying that in return for money the company I work for will reduce your compute spend on cloud processing. yes, that is literally a service. how else would you define it? Same as if you pay someone to mow your lawn, they are doing you a service in return for money.
I'll need to scroll back up to see your comments on the 12 emails I'll edit it in.
edit: i don't see any comments specifically about 12 emails but you do say "spamming me."
This will probably anger you more, but if we're talking specifics then that is compliant with what the law says is or is not "spam." So, colloquially, it could be considered spam, but legally it is not.
However, I would say all I've done is describe how the process works, (edit: for example you say I am bragging, I am not, if such clarification is needed, I am neutrally explaing the processes I am employed to undertake) I think you've gotten way angrier than is justified and blown it a bit out of proportion. I understand getting an advert for a new service is mildly annoying but I don't think it's worth getting angry enough to insult someone over.
I would remind you that all I'm doing is a fairly boring office job, sending emails to other office jobs because they work specific jobs that my company specializes in helping.
I thought it was clear we were talking about marketing in general since you announced yourself as a marketeer and made no mention of your personal industry. We should ditch the conversation. We're not going to see eye-to-eye at all here.
there's no way to briefly cover the breadth and depth of all go-to-market strategies though. B2B, B2C, N4P, and then by vertical, by segment, by persona, by horizontal, by business unit, country, technographics, firmographics, psychographics... there are as many different methods as there are companies, and in many cases several methods within a business unit within a company.
I know it's tempting to say "I hate all marketing," but I'd ask you to consider that sometimes we do like it — when a new restaurant opens that looks good, when the new series of our favorite show comes out, when a new game or movie comes out, a new Warhammer collectable, Pokémon card, muscle car, the latest match of the sports team we support...
There must be some profit-driven entertainment you enjoy and it's unlikely you were motivated to enjoy it by knowing the creators personally.
If I'm a CDAO of a billion dollar company, I've already delegated that cost reduction effort to someone else and your type of unscrupulous spray and pray marketing is exactly what I've told them to avoid once they see it.
I work in IT, and routinely blacklist vendors, block their corporate email domains, phone number blocks, etc., once I find they are doing this targeting toward my company in hopes of landing "the right decision maker" to talk to. If your product is good and worth it, and we actually need or want it, you don't need that type of sales/marketing tactic to get in the door.
Respectfully, I disagree. Procurement is a large arm of many businesses with a supply chain, and if you blocked buying teams from speaking to vendors there'd be an uproar.
You're absolutely certain none of the people at your company of Director level and above have any third party onboarding calls, nor cost reduction mandates that consider third party tools? I am extremely doubtful that is the case.
And, furthermore, I wouldn't be surprised if the company you work for goes harder than I do at mine. What's your send frequency to MQLs?
I don’t prevent them from reaching anyone. I do prevent scummy sales and marketing people from doing spray and pray email and phone tactics trying to peddle wares, though. When a company sends hundreds of emails or starts auto dialing our phone number ranges indiscriminately, they are blocked.
well then the context matters as it's not 100s of emails, it's 12 emails to one person, and that person either filled in a form or had met a specific set of dozens of criteria (as mentioned, firmographic, technographic, psychographic, in some cases based on SEC 10K/Q filings, in others based on M&A or hiring announcements) for us to consider approaching them.
We are talking about me emailing 3 people at your company, tops, during work hours, about specifically their jobs.
The "approaching 3 people" bit is quite targeted, but I still get sketched out at the fact that you're setting "12 emails" as the minimum because it's the legal maximum. It's like drivers that interpret the posted speed limit as "you must drive at least this fast, but don't go over or you will get ticketed" and not reality of "this is the max legal speed you are permitted to drive without penalty".
Before you go into a "if you don't agree with the law" bit, I'll just note that just because something you're doing is legal, doesn't make it ethical, wanted, or moral. I can play my stereo, outside,, at a certain max decibel level, every day, until exactly 10 PM, and still be within the law. That doesn't mean my neighbors won't want to murder me after the 2nd or 3rd day I do it. Ethics and morality are the reason I don't, not the law. The law if for companies/people/entire industries like yours (marketing, not your product), because society knows guardrails are needed, even if they are overly loose (likely intentionally as a byproduct of lobbying/brigery).
it's not the legal maximum it's the industry defined benchmark as affecting deliverability, at which point you want to disengage from sending to avoid a negative impact to your domain score as a legitimate sender.
You may dislike that but it's set as a benchmark because its considered de rigeur. To do otherwise affects the competitive ability of the company against its vertical competitors.
Now, again, thats not me personally but rather all email marketing (with some horizontal and vertical adjustments, e.g. industry / NAICS)
To me it's the same as no sales assistant wants to ask you if you want to super-size your meal, or sign up for the credit card, or join their rewards program: but you have to do it because it's part of the job.
What the fuck that's so often!
its really not, it sounds like a lot but compared to BoFu activities where a BDR will call you every couple of days, it's on the low end.
Your game is the reason I love that my company has an email filtering platfo9rm that tags "bulk" email and I just send all of it to trash with a rule. If your email is all fancy HTML and inline CSS to make it look flashy, not a chance I'm seeing it.
What does this mean? Like, you can just point to a random person and pay someone to get you their email?
yep
ZoomInfo, Apollo, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Lusha, Salesloft, Gong, Cognism, Gartner, G2, Voila Norbert, Hunter, FindThatLead, Prospect io, Hubspot Sales Hub...
Some examples, "Get me the email address of the VP of ITOps at every company who had series C and beyond funding in Q1 of 2022" - done. "Get me the email of the Head of Business Intelligence at Acme Ltd's Ohio office" - done. "Get me the email of Tim Smith, he works in Sales at Nike" - done.
Roughly $3/person
Can you elaborate a bit on this?
If I'm understanding you correctly, you send out marketing stuff via email, and then you call the ones who clicked through to the landing page did whatever?
Not the person you are replying to you, but I used to do email marketing for JP Morgan long time ago and we could provide heat maps of where people's mouses were hovering most of the time on our emails and people higher up than me would use that information to tell me where to lay out the links so that people might accidentally click links and get a better click-through rate
nowadays, fwiw, a lot of software filters out scam, accidental, bot, and rageclicks, because you want to prioritize actual buying intent.
yes. Some of the data is anonymized but there are ways around it (i.e. someone downloaded something at 2am and they were the only user, I can work out it's you from the time stamps)
But I can watch your mouse move around the screen as if I was filming you with my phone (obviously only your mouse pointer, I can't see your other windows or into your bedroom etc)
edit: you were asking something slightly different, yes I absolutely can see if you clicked on my email.
For some big important people, I can even get a push notification to my phone if you visit my webpage.
I understand how it works, I'm really just surprised that you're talking about it the way you are - like this is some amazing skill set employed by "professional marketers".
Not my mouse obviously because hotjar will obey "do not track" flags from browsers, but ublock will prevent the hotjar script from loading, and prevent sending any telemetry.
edit: actually I think my main point is that you would call hapless fools that clicked through. IMO this crosses the line from being a spammer to some thing more... scammy. When someone clicks on a link in your email most of them are not aware that their action will be used to profile them as a hotter lead.
I dont know what you mean by "the way i'm talking about it" I'm just describing the function to someone who was unfamiliar with the technology.
Yes, if you deliberately block a piece of software it doesn't work. I was using "I can see your" to mean "I can see any given person's" with the caveat of that person not deliberately blocking it, I figured that was taken as read.
There's more to building out this kind of functionality, including dynamic IDs on clickable elements, A/B testing colors, CTA text, dynamic personalization, client mini-sites, first- and last- click attribution, full funnel attribution, lead scoring and so on...
None of it is crazy if you know how to do it, same with fixing a car, building a cabinet, coding an app or cooking a meal.
However, it's interesting to me that you scorn how obvious this technology is and easy to use, and then close that most people don't know about email pixels, cookies (or cookieless server side tracking), and lead scoring. But to call it "scammy" like I'm doing something that literally every business does, including mom and pop stores and amateur dramatic societies, is a little unfair.
Don't shoot the messenger, I'm just talking about what happens in general terms.
Most businesses do not spam potential customers. Any business that provides actual value to its customers doesn't need to do this.
Honestly it's infuriating that you think these shady sales tactics are normal or appropriate.
As an aside, marketing involves augmenting products and services so they're better embraced by various markets.
Sending emails is something else.
I'm curious about this. Can you name a B2B company that doesn't?
Depends on how you define spam. A few personalised emails (maybe they were missed? happened to me) with an opt out button, an opt in button and a personalised landing page are nothing crazy.
However it becomes crazy when you track mouse movements, send twelve mails in six weeks, employ 'dark' surveillance marketing tactics and relentlessly bite the leg of anyone who remotely looks like they can be pressured into a contract.
So sending a few emails is fine in a business context, but @funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works's company is way overdoing it.
I guess the context is important, and I'm willing to admit that I'm an idealist with unrealistic expectations, but if there's something being sold and it's not something I requested then it's spam IMO, even in a business context.
They're never personalised. Anyone who knows me well enough to actually "personalise" an email would just call.
Marketers and sales people do call frequently. Most businesses have teams of people dedicated to calling.
People who work at businesses also get calls all the time. I'd be extremely surprised if any businesses didn't get phone calls. I find all these really strong reactions very odd. As everything is mobile phone nowadays its more individual but since the invention of the telephone, receptionists and telephone operators were full time jobs.
People are acting like it's cruel and unusual to phone someone, yet people have been doing it for hundreds of years.
I would be way more wary about someone I don't personally know selling me something via phone than via mail.
Everyone's jumping on this "12 times in 2 weeks" thing. I think you should count the number of emails you get from certain companies and I think you'll find that any sufficiently large company has emailed you more than 12 times.
Amazon emailed me 15 times this week alone. LinkedIn Emailed me 50 times in August.
But you're already a customer. They didn't cold mail you and they respect opt outs. I suspect your company doesn't have a simple 'I don't want these emails' link.
Because you enabled notifications. Again, they didn't mail you without having a prior relationship with you and you can easily opt out.
Don't act like you're better than those two companies just because you send mails just like them. I don't think that cold calling or mailing people is wrong, just predatory practices like you described.
Don't be discouraged to discuss this further though. Just because people have a different opinion than you doesn't mean that either party is right or wrong.
well you are wrong, I do have that, its at the top and bottom of evrry email (edit for clarity: the top link is often handled by the email client, not hard-coded by me, under some circumstances it doesnt always appear, but the footer one always does) as well as a link to our privacy policy, as it's mandated by CAN-SPAM amongst others, and we have further options if the company is flagged as needing HIPAA, GDPR, GLB, CCPA etc - which also trigger different email headers and footers.
I even have a weekly automated pass of replies to emails to check for common phrases indicating they want out like "unsub" "do not" "please stop"
I once had to pull a(n old, different) company out of email blacklists by working very technically with SPF/DKIM/DMARC engineers and issue whole new security certificates across a wide range of web domains so I know full well the impact of non compliance
Nice, sounds good that you allow unwilling customers to opt out easily. Didn't expect that one.
I personally know how most of that works, but as a software developer I would refuse or tone it waaaaaay down if someone wanted me to code something like that. Most of that is unnecessary and evil, and probably illegal in some countries.
If I had to code something like this I would have a call to action button with a signup for more info and possibly a personalised email with a personalised landing page. You don't need to surveil someone to know if they are interested in your product.
Thank you for the insights into your industry.
I really think a lot of people here are blowing this out of proportion. I don't see how whether testing if red or green is better is "evil."
Or knowing if people click on the button on the top level menu, or the hero banner is "evil."
I think that's a touch hyperbolic.
But also, you say "personalized landing page" as if that's different. But you just designated "tracking" as "evil" - that's what personalization is. What you proposed as an alternative is just as "evil" as the general functions of a website.
That's not what I have an issue with. I specifically told you which behaviour I find acceptable and which I don't find acceptable. If you didn't read that, I'll just repeat it for you:
I'm willing to bet there are very few sites you interact with that don't use this technology in a way, including Lemmy.
Where does Lemmy use this technology? Or did you mean apart from Lemmy there's not many sites?
If I notice sites employing stuff like that which isn't blocked by ublock I will most likely stop using them unless they're insanely useful.
You're not talking to a regular user here. I know how the web works and what tracking and fingerprinting is. Please stop trying to normalise predatory web design practices. You already landed on Lemmy, so you get a taste of what a web without surveillance capitalism could look like.
Maybe think about what tools you really need and what tools don't really give you benefits that outweigh the invasion of privacy of your users.
Lemmy uses Cloudflare Insights on a bunch of instances.
Again, it's not about what I want, if I'm to submit a request to internal IT from the marketing dept to discontinue use of a paid product, I have to submit a legitimate use case as to why the company should abandon it, it's going to look pretty suspicious and eventually someone will ask why we can't do all the stuff we used to do, and there is no business-centric use case to decomission analytics, only a personal preference, which would be at odds to the functions of a standard marketing department.