171–180 of 223 posts
Gmail new tabs is an incredibly cool feature for people receiving tons of mails. The Gmail team realized that there is spam that's not spam, and is the promotions email, it is awesome to see them away from my inbox...
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"Forcing" is a bit much. When it is rolled out to a user, there is a popup asking which tabs the user wants to enable. It's technically opt-out, but it's literally one click (no digging through menus) to say "I don't want this."
Now I wish I took a screenshot, but I do not recall any "I don't want this" button when it hit my inbox.
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> Just because it comes from Mailchimp and/or includes an obvious unsubscribe link doesn't mean it's not spam. No, but it's VASTLY more likely not to be (if the unsubscribe link is real and working). > There are countless sites whose default behaviour goes like this: > * require an email address to create an account to use their service > * without stating this, automatically assume that they now have permission to s…
Yes, I will definitely use the paid version of Facebook and Twitter next time! Unfortunately consumers don't have a choice here. Go to a paid social network that no one uses, or put up with getting spammed by pushy marketers? Somehow everyone decided that because their business model is based on advertising they should forget about good customer experience. It's certainly not OK. Why not just have pop-ups all over yo…
Somehow everyone decided that even though companies were being annoying they would put up with it to get the service, and here we are.
My point is that complaining publicly while not changing your behavior is pointless. If enough people actually DID choose a social network that wasn't as aggressive in it's emails, not only would there then be more people on those networks, but the others would change as well.
> It's certainly not OK. Why not just have pop-ups all over your page, like the more old-school "advertising-based" websites did?
And what happened with that? People took action, and either avoided those sites or used blockers so they were ineffective. If it still worked we would see more of it.
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>choose services where their business plan doesn't require pestering you to use them more. You usually only find out they are spammers after you sign up though? At which point, even if I leave the service, I still have to deal with the spam.
If they are a real company that you wanted a service from, they aren't "spammers". At worst, they are irresponsible with their unsubscribe functionality. Legit companies that actually spam don't last long. The laws are explicit and harsh. The network operators and spam list maintainers are even harsher. If you are signing up for services for non-legit companies online then you've got bigger problems than I can addres…
It doesn't matter if I have a business relationship with the company. A 'business relationship' is what keeps them from violating the laws related to spam, but it's still spam.
Only when I purposefully and explicitly tell a company to put me on a mailing list is it not spam. If I'm making an account for other purposes it's not the same thing. If I make a purchase it's definitely not the same thing.
"For marketers who are trying to establish a personal relationship with their customers..." Isn't that kind of an oxymoron? How can the relationship be "personal" when one side of it (the marketer's side) is really just algorithmically-generated (and by that I do not necessarily mean "computer-generated") and the conversation is one-way?
I get what they're saying. I run a weekly newsletter, and often my "call to actions" are asking people to reply. Of the 6.5k people on my list, I've probably chatted in one way or another with at least 20% of them. It's definitely relationship building at scale, and while I know it's "write once, send N-times", myself and most of the people on my list see a distinction between my newsletter and a grid of items on sal…
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Then you are most likely using the term incorrectly. When you have a business relationship with a company and you have not told them to not email you, the email is not entirely unsolicited, and thus not spam. It may be unwanted though, which is why Google is routing it to the "promotions" section. It's not necessarily spam though, which is why they don't immediately route it to the spam section.
When you have a business relationship with a company and you have not told them to not email you, the email is not entirely unsolicited, and thus not spam. If you gave them your e-mail address obviously for another purpose (for example, as an account ID, or to receive a confirmation message when your order is dispatched or your card is charged) and they then use it for general marketing then that's so clearly an abus…
This isn't a conversation about "SPAM", it's a conversation about companies managing customer contact responsibly, and customers responding responsibly to the contact, which in some cases means not overreacting.
> There's a pretty simple test for your situation, really: if you want to send people marketing messages but aren't willing to ask their permission explicitly because you think they'll say no, your messages are probably spam and you're probably a spammer.
But that's begging the question, since you already put the reasoning in place. What if it's as simple as testing shows that customers will overwhelmingly opt-out initially, but then there's a steady influx of evidence that customers would benefit from some level of contact (i.e. support requests that say as much, forum posts, etc), such as noting when a previously charged for service is now free, when service outages are scheduled to happen, etc.
In the end, is it really so hard to see how a company acts in it's correspondence before vilifying it?
News flash: you don't own my inbox.
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If they are a real company that you wanted a service from, they aren't "spammers". At worst, they are irresponsible with their unsubscribe functionality. Legit companies that actually spam don't last long. The laws are explicit and harsh. The network operators and spam list maintainers are even harsher. If you are signing up for services for non-legit companies online then you've got bigger problems than I can addres…
The definition of spam is simple: unsolicited bulk email It doesn't matter if I have a business relationship with the company. A 'business relationship' is what keeps them from violating the laws related to spam, but it's still spam. Only when I purposefully and explicitly tell a company to put me on a mailing list is it not spam. If I'm making an account for other purposes it's not the same thing. If I make a purcha…
The CAN-SPAM Act defines commercial messages as those
that primarily advertise or promote a commercial product or
service. The FCC’s ban does not cover “transactional or
relationship” messages -- that is, notices to facilitate a
transaction you have already agreed to -- for example,
messages that provide information about your existing
account or warranty information about a product you’ve
purchased.
If you don't want that, opt out.
If you don't like how they handled the email process, complain to the company.
If you still don't like it, stop using the service.
Anything else just means that they have no way of notifying you about anything unless you visit their site. In some cases, I sure as hell want to know if they are offering free services or other promotions. In others, I opt out.
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The definition of spam is simple: unsolicited bulk email It doesn't matter if I have a business relationship with the company. A 'business relationship' is what keeps them from violating the laws related to spam, but it's still spam. Only when I purposefully and explicitly tell a company to put me on a mailing list is it not spam. If I'm making an account for other purposes it's not the same thing. If I make a purcha…
Here's the thing, I think the CAN-SPAM act actually defined this pretty well: The CAN-SPAM Act defines commercial messages as those that primarily advertise or promote a commercial product or service. The FCC’s ban does not cover “transactional or relationship” messages -- that is, notices to facilitate a transaction you have already agreed to -- for example, messages that provide information about your existing acco…
>If you have an account with them, and it's informational, even if it's just about a new service you can take advantage on that account you already have, they can contact you about it.
They can but they shouldn't unless I asked.
> If you don't want that, opt out.
If it's opt-out then the company loses a lot of points.
> If you don't like how they handled the email process, complain to the company.
Even better, I can warn potential customers about the way the company acts.
> If you still don't like it, stop using the service.
See above.
> Anything else just means that they have no way of notifying you about anything unless you visit their site. In some cases, I sure as hell want to know if they are offering free services or other promotions. In others, I opt out.
They can notify me all they want about the actual transactions I am performing with them, monetary or other. But when it comes to solicitation they should have a very explicit opt-in process.