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Browsing your website does not mean I want your spam

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Re: Browsing your website does not mean I want your spam

#151

Post by akg_67 »

wpietri wrote: post #147
akg_67 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In early 2000's, as B2B Product Manager, I implemented a similar customer outreach program. We will reverse lookup the name associated with visitor IP address and then look into our own sales contact database for contacts in that company. Depending on contact quality, we will reach out to them using phone, email or personal visit from a sales rep in the area. A few times, we decided to hold 'lunch-and-learn' type in-…

Wow. Any vendor doing this to me goes on a perma-ban list. If they don't respect me before the sale, I'd have no reason to think they'd respect me after.

Why do you think the proactive customer outreach is "not respecting you"?

I view it as providing high level of customer service, before and after sales, in B2B space. It is no different than Amazon displaying related products that you might be interested in or Netflix showing you a queue based on your past viewings, in consumer space.

For example, if a visitor's company produces widgets and as a vendor we have previously helped other producers of same widget. It is in both our and visitors interest to share such and related information. Similarly, a visitor from an existing customer might be searching for a solution to her problem with the vendor's product and doesn't believe the problem is big enough to warrant a support/service call or it is a user and not administrator/manager of the product. A proactive engagement by vendor support group goes a long way in understanding the potential user issues with product, a valuable insight for future product enhancements.

In B2B settings, sales cycles are long and require lot of information exchange between various stakeholders within the potential customer. Both vendor and potential user of the product inside the company (who might become internal champion of solution) benefit by build the relationship early, quickly and efficiently.

IMO, this is the main reason for DropBox failure in penetrating the enterprise despite its high usage by individual users within enterprise. Delays in engaging enterprise users allowed Box to get in to enterprise accounts by targeting decision makers and overriding individual users' preference.

Re: Browsing your website does not mean I want your spam

#152

Post by stebalien »

eridius wrote: post #34
ashark wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Learning to stop worrying about messing up people's ability to deliver email and just liberally hammer the "REPORT SPAM" button for any email I didn't want to see anymore improved my email experience substantially. So much faster than messing with filters. I also tell Twitter that every ad they show me is offensive. Because they are.

The problem with this is it's easy to start getting legitimate marketing emails that you signed up for filed as spam, because they look similar to the marketing emails that you've been reporting. For example, for a while SpamAssassin decided that every email from the PlayStation store (even receipt emails) was spam, primarily because they look similar to other emails I've marked.

Or ones from my bank that include a lovely advertisement at the bottom... But you know what, I just let them stay in my spam folder because they are spam (and important emails usually don't have advertisements attached).

Example that tripped up bogofilter:

    Show them the love.Whether it's candy,flowers, or something extra special, shop through the Earn
    More Mall® Site and watch your Bonus Rewards Currency add up.
    
    Got the winter time blues? Pack your bags and plan your escape - your rewards can lead you to a
    world of travel. Search from a wide variety of hotel, cruise or vacation packages.             
    
    This limited-time offer is available July 1, 2016 through September 30, 2016.
    
    Gap, Old Navy and Banana Republic gift cards have no expiration or maintenance fees, and can be
    used at the following Gap Inc. brand stores and websites: Gap, Old Navy, Banana Republic, and
    Athleta. Limit 5 gift cards redeemable per online transaction. Gift cards are redeemable for
    merchandise only, cannot be replaced if lost or stolen, and may not be redeemed with certain
    promotional offers. Restricted to use in the USA, Canada and Puerto Rico.

Re: Browsing your website does not mean I want your spam

#153

Post by cholantesh »

davb wrote: post #58

I once had something similar, if not worse, happen. I was researching some network equipment, looking at lots of websites and comparing products. Then my desk phone rings. A call being passed from the switchboard - someone asking for the person responsible for IT purchasing. It was a sales rep from a network equipment distributor, saying they noticed I was browsing their website and wanted to help me through the purc…

Yep, this happened to me once when I was house hunting earlier this year. I was pretty livid, and the poor rep on the other end found that out pretty quickly.

Re: Browsing your website does not mean I want your spam

#155

Post by shostack »

idlewords wrote: post #85

It's a little rich to write this complaint on Medium, a site that has been uniquely aggressive about tracking its readers' behavior (it has a script that phones home with your position on the page, and its URLs abuse the fragment identifier to track who you got the link from). If you dislike surveillance capitalism enough to write an essay about it, think about where you're publishing it.

The page position thing I totally get. They don't care about individual data there but they want to identify if content is being fully read. It is a big challenge for any publisher and very important in getting the most engaging content front and center.

Re: Browsing your website does not mean I want your spam

#156

Post by shostack »

idlewords wrote: post #85

It's a little rich to write this complaint on Medium, a site that has been uniquely aggressive about tracking its readers' behavior (it has a script that phones home with your position on the page, and its URLs abuse the fragment identifier to track who you got the link from). If you dislike surveillance capitalism enough to write an essay about it, think about where you're publishing it.

The page position thing I totally get. They don't care about individual data there but they want to identify if content is being fully read. It is a big challenge for any publisher and very important in getting the most engaging content front and center.

Re: Browsing your website does not mean I want your spam

#157

Post by wangchow »

taneq wrote: post #140
TeMPOraL wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It used to be totally fine for one shopkeeper to mention to another that he saw a customer looking for a particular item. When you do it at scale, the old rules don't apply. The on-line equivalent of that would be e-commerce sites sharing their detailed analytics data with each other. What was described in the article is more alike to a shopkeeper saying to another, "Did you see that woman in red scarf? Her name is…

"She's just received a big payout from her ex-husband so she'll be willing to pay more, and she likes cats, especially white ones. Also her sister's birthday is coming up and the sister is obsessed with horse racing so you might be able to sell her some memorabilia. Jack up the price so she'll think it's valuable."

Nowadays more like: Her genetic makeup is abc so she's prone to disease xyz. Use fear tactic and she'll be at your doorstep begging for a cure.

Disgusting, but captures the information age in a nutshell..

Re: Browsing your website does not mean I want your spam

#159

Post by toomanybeersies »

Houshalter wrote: post #133
trjordan wrote: post #15

> This transaction breaks a core promise using the internet: just because I visit a website doesn’t mean I consent to getting spam from it. No it doesn't. There is no core privacy premise of the internet, and certainly not one that everybody used it signed up for. I'm not condoning this behavior, but we're in territory that we don't have prior art for. It used to be totally fine for one shopkeeper to mention to anoth…

> It used to be totally fine for one shopkeeper to mention to another that he saw a customer looking for a particular item. I dunno. If a shopkeeper kept detailed records of everything you've ever bought or looked at, and gave that info away, it would be pretty creepy.

Supermarkets do that. It's actually scary how much data they collect and what they can do with it. Target managed to figure out when people were pregnant: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targe...

Re: Browsing your website does not mean I want your spam

#160

Post by toomanybeersies »

davb wrote: post #58

I once had something similar, if not worse, happen. I was researching some network equipment, looking at lots of websites and comparing products. Then my desk phone rings. A call being passed from the switchboard - someone asking for the person responsible for IT purchasing. It was a sales rep from a network equipment distributor, saying they noticed I was browsing their website and wanted to help me through the purc…

As terrible as it is, it's rather ingenious.
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