Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Email marketing for e-commerce

stripe.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–108 of 108 posts

Re: Email marketing for e-commerce

#101

Post by fiatjaf »

mars4rp wrote: post #98
fiatjaf wrote: post #56

Imagine you have a list of emails from users of your app. You want to send a one-time notification to them. For example, saying that you'll start charging for the app in two months (just an example). How do you proceed? I wish there was an app that would take a list of emails and a Mailgun/etc. API token and send that one-time email to these people.

Please forgive my ignorance but how hard is it to write a for loop and send email to each? Even Mailgun should have a method for bulk send!

Well, not hard, I've done that many times, but still, there are thousands of apps out there for making lists and other stupid stuff, and you're not saying this on their threads.

Re: Email marketing for e-commerce

#102

Post by ken »

chadash wrote: post #7

> 91% of customers want to hear from the companies they do business with. It’s unavoidable in the modern e-commerce marketing world. The quote is referring to email marketing. This seems pretty misleading. I can believe that 91% of people want to hear from some companies. But I'd bet that most people are not interested in hearing from most of the companies they do business with. There's a simple solution to this. It'…

Yes, and the link for that first sentence is a survey which specifically asked about promotions, "e.g., coupons, sales".

That is, what does it take to make a person happy to receive an email from a business? Answer: only the opportunity to spend less money with that business.

It's extremely misleading to try to hijack that statistic into a generic "customers want to hear from companies" claim. Most of this article is about how to get people to spend more money, which is exactly the opposite of what people in this survey indicated.

Re: Email marketing for e-commerce

#103

Post by deveshkhanal »

mlevental wrote: post #90
paulie_a wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you track open rates that result in clicking unsubscribe? I open a lot of email just to click that link

i wish devs understood something: whatever pathological behavior you're participating in is just that: pathological. 99.99999999% of people just read emails and do nothing insidious/clever/nefarious. there are literally like 5 people like you and 100,000 people just reading the email and either clicking or not clicking, buying or not buying, etc.

Thank you for saying this. Agree 1000%

Re: Email marketing for e-commerce

#104

Post by deveshkhanal »

a_d wrote: post #97
SteveGerencser wrote: post #67

I work with several clients that between them send roughly 1 million emails per day, every day, and we are small compared to others I know. They fully understand that there are people like most people here that hate email marketing of any kind. But the response rate to those emails is significant. On an average day they get a 15% open rate. Click rates and purchase rates step down at each stage depending on the purpo…

I will attempt to argue against email marketing as a channel for any startup (B2b or B2c). 1. Channel is extremely crowded. Everyone has read the same best-practices and optimization techniques. So emails from most companies (each one of them thinking that they are ‘differentiated) regress in quality and content to a mean. 2. Because it is so measurable (a marketer’s dream), this channel becomes less about what the e…

"This is probably an ignorant rant" Correct. I researched the engagement numbers: http://growthrock.co/social-media-statistics/

HN folks always hate on email, but compared to other channels (social in particular) the engagement is insane. Insane. 15% quoted by the guy in a thread above for example is unheard of on Twitter/FB.

And compared to paid social/paid search it's SO much cheaper once the list is built.

Re: Email marketing for e-commerce

#105

Post by deveshkhanal »

deveshkhanal wrote: post #104
a_d wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will attempt to argue against email marketing as a channel for any startup (B2b or B2c). 1. Channel is extremely crowded. Everyone has read the same best-practices and optimization techniques. So emails from most companies (each one of them thinking that they are ‘differentiated) regress in quality and content to a mean. 2. Because it is so measurable (a marketer’s dream), this channel becomes less about what the e…

"This is probably an ignorant rant" Correct. I researched the engagement numbers: http://growthrock.co/social-media-statistics/ HN folks always hate on email, but compared to other channels (social in particular) the engagement is insane. Insane. 15% quoted by the guy in a thread above for example is unheard of on Twitter/FB. And compared to paid social/paid search it's SO much cheaper once the list is built.

Please save the "once the list built" <--- see, that's the catch. It's not the catch, it's not that hard to build the list (compared to making paid channels work from an ROI perspective). And in particular for ecommerce (topic of stripe article) just having a simple checkbox for anyone checking out to opt in is more or less free. Mailchimp costs compared to ad costs are also super cheap.

Re: Email marketing for e-commerce

#106

Post by theuncommon »

"91% of customers want to hear from the companies they do business with." sounds like a bit of an exaggeration, but I agree - email marketing is still a powerful tool for engaging audiences. Looking forward to seeing how it evolves in the next couple of years.

Re: Email marketing for e-commerce

#107

Post by zaarn »

Nadya wrote: post #15
zaarn wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's usually opt-in (if it isn't, a lot of jurisdictions allow you to sue or do other nasty things) but it's ticked by default and somewhat hidden above and below the ToS/EULA.

Checked-by-default means, by definition, it is opt-out as you are opted-in by default. It just has to be possible to opt-out and, if opted-in, unsubscribe at a later date (usually a small, hard to notice link in the legalese of the spam email).

I think it was a bit of a miscommunication, but yes, it's opt-out then.

Re: Email marketing for e-commerce

#108

Post by ludovicthomas »

dandare wrote: post #11

As an aspiring SaaS founder, I was surprised how hard email marketing (EM) is. My questions so far: 1/ ROI - how much of a difference can good EM make as opposed to bad EM or no EM? Should I not rather focus on improving my product? 2/ What is the low hanging fruit? 3/ What are some of the tools I should be using? If my payment management is in Strip, how do I integrate it with the CRM? [answer: https://stripe.com/wo…

"What is the low hanging fruit?" --> It's exactly why we're building Highlights (https://www.gethighlights.co/) - to help solopreneurs, entrepreneurs and small businesses automatically find and prioritize their biggest marketing opportunities using the data in their existing marketing tools (Google Analytics, MailChimp).

It's a tedious task that needs regular attention and skills to ensure you're not underperforming, or identify low hanging fruits like old blog posts that are performing well and can be leveraged to get more sales or signups.

Post reply on HN