[tgrass]

This is my gut reaction. And yet time and again you hear from the likes of patio11 et al that one should leverage email as an engagement tool.

For anyone with experience in this, does it just come down to weighing the benefit of gaining a customer against the risk of losing two?

[kintamanimatt]

The thing is, overly-aggressive marketing tactics that you wouldn't want to be subjected to yourself have downsides that aren't readily detectable by your stats and dashboard.

There was someone who's articles and videos I'd share on reddit because they contain (and still do!) really, really great content. The trouble is, they're now wrapped up in overly-aggressive marketing tactics. The videos now have a YouTube ad and a 15 second intro lead-in that reminds me of the THX intro clip [1]. This is followed by an advertisement for other products, followed by the actual content, followed by the spammiest looking "click subscribe!" clip. If you visit his website for the first time, you're now immediately greeted with a popup asking to subscribe to their email list. Again, really great content wrapped up in unempathetic marketing tactics. Last time I shared something he'd created on a targeted subreddit, everyone immediately bitched it was spam and it was downvoted; they missed the content because of yucky marketing.

Every time I'd post a link, pre-unempathetic marketing, it would (apparently) net him a lot of traffic and reach a previously untapped audience. (I'd get a thank-you email for the huge spike in traffic!) Social media traffic is harder to convert but can be done quite effectively when done properly. What this person can't measure is my current unwillingness to continue to share his best content because of these overly aggressive, unempathetic tactics. I put up with them and still consume his content because I know it's good and it appeals to my interests, but it seems to make newbies bounce very quickly.

There are marketing tactics that "work" and will result in a positive bump in metrics but have an ick-factor to them and hidden cost. Same deal with on-boarding emails, nagging emails, jQuery popups begging for an email address, etc. They have tangible results and appear to be working, but the undetectable damage is still present.

My general rule of thumb is that if you wouldn't want someone to subject you to the tactic, don't subject others.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sfg9DVwOd9w

[chc]

It comes from the benefit of gaining 10 over the risk of losing one. There exist people who vehemently hate receiving email but for some reason refuse to just opt out, and you will lose them. But they are not the common case. Remember that unless your target market is "a handful of people on HN," you should not place much faith in a self-selected sample of vocal HN users expressing their personal feelings.

Many people here will also tell you that $100 a month is an outrageous price for a service that saves time for software engineers. It is true that they feel that way, but it's a mathematically false statement.