Marketing automation is getting out-of-hand
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I managed IT at a printing press where we used letterpress printing on cotton rag paper to "type" "personal" letters to lists of a million people. We "signed" the letters in different ink. We paid extra for first class stamps instead of postage meter.
And, we would send up to five letters in a series each referring to the one before, and by the last letter, we printed yellow highlighter over key sell phrases and 'wrote' in the margins with different colored ink to say this is the stuff that really matters to you.
These campaigns were deadly effective.
I can see how it probably works with many people, but it doesn't change the fact that it is at best deceitful, at worse a lie.
I think that the difference, at least to me, is that none of those examples are trying to be a personalized message. Imitating a hand-signed card that imitates "caring" says "we wanted you to have the same emotional reaction as if we did put in the effort but without us having to actually put in the effort." It's automating feelings and that rubs me the wrong way.
Ah well, just another step along the path of automating everything to the point where robots read the mail, respond to the mail, send the mass-mail, decide what to deal with and what to discard, then dealing with the discarded remnants.
https://www.google.com/search?q=handwritten+letters+online&i...
I get tons of "personal" emails from sales reps trying to set up a short meeting with me to discuss my hiring needs.
I received a "next level" type of spam like this. It was all of the above, but they also had a "hand written" Post-It/sticky note calling out the pricing on top of the ad.
It was like some friend received some typical throw away marketing in the mail, highlighted and stickied a couple sections and wrote me a personal note telling me how much I would enjoy this deal, then folded it all up and mailed it to me.
I used MyScriptFont to create 10 different fonts of my handwriting using a sharpie. Then I wrote a script that would randomize each letter. We used this to create "hand addressed" envelopes that looked like I had written them with a felt tip pen. Two could go to the same address and you couldn't tell it wasn't hand written. We also did a series of letters and they were very effective. Every time we dropped one, my phone would ring from people calling me because they received my letter and wanted to talk about it.
This article isn't about marketing automation, it is about lazy marketing automation.
Thanks for telling us about what you did campaigning as a politician, and keep it coming.
The truth we learn is worth a lot more than ad hominem moraliziing.
End of the day, politics is a numbers game and moralizing over the typeface of a letter that at worst ends up in the junk heap is the last thing worth even an iota of energy getting comparatively upset about.
If someone feels so strongly about slick typeface maneuvers to get voters opening an envelope, I'd encourage that person to run for office themselves and make outlawing that sort of activity a campaign promise and let us know how it goes.
So he starts his political career with a clever font hack, a little fib to his potential voters. Apparently not worth an iota of concern. So what's the next fib? Perhaps a broken election promise that he never intended to keep, just playing the numbers game? And so it may continue.
We always complain about our politicians looking after their own interests first. If we just shrug when they start their career like this, treating the electorate as a group to be tricked and fooled into action, is it any wonder?
And then you get to the end and it's got a donation form to give to the party, so that they can do everything you filled out in the survey. Probably very effective for many party members who don't think about it deeply.
Now, does that sort of campaign marketing material present a moral problem? I think it's just good marketing.
We could make a broader point about how all marketing wants you to envision yourself with [product / experience / political leader] and how that will make your life better. Is it all lies? Mostly. Is it immoral? Nah, it's just marketing :-)
Having said that, I think the ethics of this political strategy depends on the intentions. If a politician has true respect for the people, wants to give personal touch, and just doesn't have enough time to handwrite the letters - that's okay in my view. If a politician is purely looking for means of influence - that in my opinion is "not okay".
The "handwriting hack" is all about getting people to open the letter and read it. I didn't get phone calls from constituents because of the handwriting, the phone calls were because of the content.
The comment is valid, I don't think your premise is valid because I don't think the lines were sufficiently drawn to either a prescriptive or descriptive concept established in law. I also think the "ethical" premise is invalid equally.
I'm allowed to think premises are invalid and speak up on them; as of yet there hasn't been a convincing enough argument towards the 'ickiness' of using handwritten typefaces in a letter to possible voters to convince me otherwise.
If you're going to sit there and call that cynical, fine. That's on you, but I still think both premises are broken.
It is common practice to use handwriting fonts to increase the response rate of mail. It is easy to discern that they are fonts. I just made it much harder to discern.
This is probably NOT marketing automation (Marketo, Eloqua, or HubSpot) you're coming up against, it's a new class of tools that run "playbooks" via moderately sophisticated mail merged email campaigns. It's an effort to automate and/or optimize what junior sales staff (often called Sales or Business Development Representatives) do.
Some of those tools include Outreach.io, Salesloft, and Toutapp. It could also be a home brewed app firing these emails.
These are designed to seem like a person wrote those emails to you, but really they are running on a schedule and logic, listening for pixel loads, link clicks, and/or your response. If you don't respond, they can respond to themselves after X business days/hours, etc. They are being optimized for conversion, and some even have A/B testing built in.
Coupled with outsourced labor or scrapers focused on picking up on signals and populating a specific field to be mail merged (in OP's case, a title from a job posting), some of these things literally run themselves. Generally, you get a human when you respond back -- as the algorithms aren't smart enough [yet] to respond back appropriately.
Hope this clears it up. I hate being on the other side of these things too. If you get one and want it to stop, either click the CAN-SPAM opt out or briskly respond accordingly.
Much of a BDR's job is to find an email template that works for a certain type of prospect, and then to find as many of that type of prospect as possible and send them that email. You can expand this to a 'cadence' of emails. But whether or not they are automating their work with this kind of tool, the prospect's experience wouldn't change much.
Edit: I should also add that (again – in our case) we push our BDRs to send one-off, personalized emails and get on the phone as much as possible. They're ultimately judged by the amount of business they generate, not how many prospects they blast emails to.
I think a major point of annoyance is that these emails often do not have opt-out links, to preserve the illusion that they are personal emails.
Under CAN-SPAM they must:
-[Have] A visible and operable unsubscribe mechanism is present in all emails.
-Honor all opt-out requests within 10 days.
Failure to provide either of those on any automated business email is a violation of the act. A number of these startups (and tools) are in violation of the act with this 'illusion'.
Not sure why you say this when all three (Marketo, Eloqua & HubSpot) have features to do exactly this kind of email automation.
I just outright disagree that this is a productive use of resources for society.
Since when is 4 cars not a lot of cars?
The letters were downright devious. The company letterhead was designed specifically to look at a glace like the state official emblem, the contents were all white paper, no photoshopped images (cheaper to produce and more accurate to the real deal, win win I guess) and the marketing materials were designed to look like pre-filled official forms, except when you actually read it you realized it was application for that bloody warranty.
I can't fucking believe it's legal to send shit like that. You're two steps from impersonating the Government. I could totally see someone a little further on in years (or just not paying attention!) thinking they had to respond.
"YOUR DOMAIN IS EXPIRING ..."
And they're always from SEO companies trying to sell marketing.
In Poland it's normal practice. You register a company, you get serious looking email from private companies which names are very similar to related government entity which tells you to pay for registration (which is free). It's going on for years, no consequences for them.
The same about golden and silver coins, gold plated religious stuff - company called freaking "NATIONAL TREASURY" aimed to look like national mint sells this shit for years.
But a lot of marketing people seem to think that the best way to do this is to annoy potential or existing customers, so that their employer's brand will always come to mind first, even if it is tainted with somewhat negative feelings about the product. In one way, I don't blame them - that technique is empirically proven to work, marketing people want to meet their targets, get paid, and go home like everyone else does, and the uncertain nature of business communication makes it difficult to adjust to the information preferences of each individual consumer.
But in another way, I do blame them, for two reasons. One, because they are deliberately choosing to clutter up people's lives with unwanted solicitations of attention, often despite specifically being asked not to. One thing I really miss about living in the Netherlands is that the post office there gives you stickers you can put on your mail box/slot to indicate whether you are willing to accept different kinds of commercial mail, both generic and personal.
Two, because a great deal of marketing material goes beyond a solicitation and description of goods and services and into bullshit and deception. Almost every marketing professional I've ever met seems to think that some dishonesty in commercial matters is OK. It's understandable, as they're partly backed by a legal system that historically regards many false claims in advertising as 'mere puffery' - essentially saying that because consumers are exposed to a lot of bullshit anyway, it's OK to bullshit them.
I disagree, and the greater the degree of bullshit I receive from any given business, the more likely I am to retaliate against them in some fashion, by adding them to spam lists, badmouthing them within my social circle, or occasionally responding with bullshit communications of my own designed to waste their time - followed up with helpful comparisons to their own marketing materials so they understand that deception doesn't pay.
But I am with you in that, that for all the money marketing people are getting, they could be more creative how to get our attention and how to reach us. Most of them just repeat over and over same old stuff, whether it is direct mail, spamming your inbox or retargeting.
Then a year or two back someone tried to launch a startup here - without much success, thank heavens - that paid people (poorly) to actually write out addresses and even letters by hand, so that people could receive 'genuine' hand-written mail from businesses they were dealing with, which would appear to be a personal thank-you note from the CEO or whatever. Happily most other HN readers were similarly dismayed and the founder was excoriated, though I'm sure the business lives on and is probably profitable given the economic incentives.
Living in the US, I really don't think that full first amendment protections should extend to corporations or commercial speech. Sure, corporations are legal persons (for some very valid reasons), but that personhood should be severely limited - after all, we wouldn't allow corporations to start launching artillery shells at each other on the theory that they deserved second amendment rights (in the USA obviously).
I don't favor pre-emptive censorship, but I do favor the idea that deceptive commercial speech should expose the dishonest speaker to severe civil damages as punishment for seeking to exploit public trust mechanisms for private asymmetrical gain.
But it is dysfunctional, or even anti-functional, for the economy. Because with advertisements we're not buying the "best" product, but rather the one with the biggest associated marketing budget.
It undermines the most important merit of capitalism.
First of all, who gets to determine what is "best"? You? The relativity of perceived product value makes it hard to prove that people are buying the "wrong" things. The whole point of markets is that it is impossible to determine in advance what people really want.
If what you said were true, the biggest marketing budget would always win, but it doesn't--far from it. The economy is littered with the wasted marketing budgets of failed products.
(In fact, most quotes are a form of marketing, not for products but for ideas.)
That would be true if ad budget = ad quality, but I don't think it does.
For years and years we've been telling everyone that software is eating the world, and that everyone needs to be more data driven. This is one of those results: software-mediated marketing outreach, measuring various response actions and using them as signals to determine further outreach.
I also think it's perhaps a bit unfair to blame marketers in isolation. They are just chasing the best conversion rates, and if they ceased doing so, their bosses would fire and replace them.
Honestly, the solution here is to introduce a concept to the software industry that exists in more mature industries: brand management. The second you develop an internal notion of your own brand, you start to develop a mental framework for how customers (and people in general) perceive that brand, and how actions like optimizing marketing automation can have negative consequences on brand perception. You learn to treat marketing strategically, and not just tactically.
Brand marketing is the counterbalance that keeps outbound marketing honest.
"As People Get Weary of Sales Automation, Direct Sales Contacts Prevail
The email automation era is becoming very easy to spot, and it’s happening everywhere. Multiple emails like this land in our inboxes on a daily basis. This robotic tactic may even begin to harm a brand’s reputation.
Sales people will go back to being people and will personalize an email or pick up the damn phone. The excitement of automation in the digital era will also make people realize that they like to talk to people"
http://www.cmswire.com/digital-marketing/marketing-trends-sh...
Seemed relevant ;)
Yes, I know that Push Marketing and Marketing Automation is a thing and that they probably originally chose the words because they didn't have such a negative connotation (that's good marketing!), but what does this really have to do with a market? I am not a market... just an unwilling product being packaged and sold.
Usually these emails are the result a sales-focused organization being oversold on a marketing platform and trying to put it to good use the only way they know how: buying lists and sending them unsolicited emails.
But marketing automation in general is much more all-encompassing and you shouldn't necessarily mind it when done well. More and more it doesn't even involve email.
Also, web personalization, but we are not very happy with the product we are using and are trying to work out some kinks.
It actually seems to be the case already, but I dream of the day where the facial recognition system in the store turns on a little red light on the cash register, notifying the cashier that I'm going to respond negatively.
We also have built-in stopgaps that limit the amount of emails people get. Nobody gets more than x per unit of time, the ratio of which we are always trying to push down.
I'm curious as to what you did with MindFire, and what marketing objective(s) you were trying to solve?
As strange as it sounds (given that we are often considered a marketing automation company), I tend to agree with the notion that the space is getting out of hand, but for slightly different reasons than the original post.
What I see is that there are many (many!) different problems marketers are solving for. All vendors claim they do everything (which as we know, is simply not true). For a marketer seeking a specific solution, it is becoming increasingly difficult to identify the right solution.
In a similar fashion, as a provider of this kind of technology, it is increasingly difficult to communicate with the market given that there are so many similar messages.
Interested in everyone's perspective.
I used to work for a programming startup, we all worked from home and logged into an IRC channel to communicate.
People would come and go and you;d have the rounds of "hello", "good morning", "how are you today" etc. so I wrote an IRC hello_bot to do it for me, made a list of my typical greetings and that all was good. It only ran when I was logged in so if more interaction was required, I was on hand.
Eventually our Sales Manager worked out it was a bot and got really angry, while the tech people (everyone but him) thought it was a cool and fun thing. He didn't appreciate that my bot to say hello to him probably took me more effort to get right than I ever put into actually saying hello.
It was a good lesson to me.
(later we found he had been skimming money off the top of contracts, rippig us off for thousands and the company ceased trading, I'm not sure if that's related :)
So many are just pushing out generic mass emails every 3 days and calling it marketing automation. That is not marketing automation, that is spam.
Is there a part of you that is still human? If your "user" didn't buy the thing, that may be because that human decided he didn't want it. Pestering him ("reminding" or "enticing") may shove him farther down your sales funnel, but don't pretend it's anything but hostile.
Yeah when done poorly, it can be ineffective and overbearing but I think that is the case with a lot of things that are done poorly.
Nope. Not anymore.
That used to be the case, I don't know, 10 years ago? But in these days of the spampocalypse, not replying to emails feels about as rude as stepping on ants on the sidewalk.
Sorry, but my time is literally the only non-renewable resource I have.
[1] https://www.acceptemail.com/us/blog/acceptemail-authorized-b...
On a more serious note I think the article points out something that automation erases. This person wants a genuine interaction instead of a simulacrum of a human interaction.
Hamming has a great lecture series where he consistently re-iterates the point of human/machine interactions as a symbiotic relationship where the machines augment and enhance human qualities instead of just substituting for them. Norbert Weiner before him says the same things at the dawn of cybernetics and information theory. There is much potential in these machine enhanced systems but it seems like it is all being squandered.
Fortune 500 companies employee fleets of just out of college marketing majors to do just this sort of thing.
Companies often die because they don't send enough emails, not the other way around. Fallibility is your own worst enemy in a startup, and email outbound is one way to kill it faster.
That being said, there should only be one follow up.
There's only 2 reasons that have high response rates for messaging people outbound.
1. They want to make you famous and build a relationship with you. In which case you should respond. I always advise this as the best method for building customer relationships. Just setup a blog and reach out to them asking to interview them about what they do. Only after the outbound company knows the candidate, should they discuss the mechanics of their businesses and if they can help eachother.
2. If there's deep timing context. (Saw you just raised, saw you in the press, etc...)
3. (This one is really tough, but if you're very high profile, you can just reach out.)
Everything else is likely low response/open rate.
You'd need a whitelist system along with it, else legitimate lists with large subscription bases would get hit hard.
As is usual with these kind of proposals, you'll find it ticks many items on the checklist: https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt
Also you could add a call feature where if a recruiter/sales person wants to schedule a call they can (via forwarded number to keep anonymity) at the agreed rate.
There's automating general messaging, and then there's automating "personalised" smalltalk.
One persistent Salesdude actually figured out where I ate breakfast and showed up there to run into me once.
The email version is easier to deal with. It's moderately annoying,but really no big deal.
It's kinda like a designer and developer. People who only see IT work from a distance may feel they are 'people who make websites' but there is a entirely different skillset and method difference, but there can be some crossover and they combine well together.
These super targeted email and phone campaigns are more like a sales process. Marketing traditionally was about educating with propaganda and matching problem with solution for lead generation. Now there's more attempts to actually sell!
On the sales side, the old school salespeople who were really there to build relationships and solve problems are a dying breed. Modern salespeople are hamsters on some micromanaged CRM wheel, even from big companies.
My inbox is a real inbox with emails that are real.
I sleep fine at night.
If you still receive any email from @linkedin.com, you need to fix your spam filter so that no longer happens.
How is this legal and not a violation of CANSPAM?
I wouldn't mind an automated message if they had something I really really wanted. The problem is, 99.9999% of the time, automated message or non-automated messages aren't offering me anything I actually want.
Case in point: if an automated message offered you a mansion in your neighborhood for sale, at 200$, would you really be upset that the message was automated?
I get emails from services that I'm actively trialing and evaluating to see how effectively it meets my needs. That's how they got my email address in the first place. I'm interested as hell in their services. I may have already bought their services.
I have exactly zero interest in being interrupted and distracted by an ad copy regurgitating the same basic information I already looked at on their fucking website - or worse, sharing information they hid from their website. I cannot hit unsubscribe fast enough. If it wasn't worth writing, it certainly wasn't worth sending!
> Case in point: if an automated message offered you a mansion in your neighborhood for sale, at 200$, would you really be upset that the message was automated?
I would be upset that they've clearly sold my email address to a third party - or worse, have some kind of advertisement XSS stealing login emails - spamming me clear scams, email their security alias to notify them assuming the worst, make my spam filters more aggressive, and second guess if I really want to entrust their services with any of my data.
Even if, somehow, against all odds, you could convince me it was a 'legitimate' offer, I'd assume the automation was bugged and the offer would fall through, or that the property had some kind of significant issue - huge tax burden, implied responsibility for superfund site cleanup, onerous historical upkeep and maintenance requirements, etc. that would make me uninterested in the actual deal.
You could convince my closest confidants to take up the deal, a perfectly legitimate offer with no such hidden issues or strings, honor it, and on my death bed I'd be wondering when the other shoe was going to drop on them, upset that they'd been conned.
If I want a $200 mansion, I'll go out and find it, if it exists. Don't call me - and most especially do not call me with a python script pretending to be a real boy engaging in a real one on one conversation when it isn't - I'll call you.
But that's not the sincere reason why I hate it. The sincere reason is because there's one of me and millions of companies all thinking they have a right to my attention so I can give their offer a genuine consideration.
If I do see an offer and don't want it, I'm not hating on that specific offer that I didn't want.
I am hating on the way the overall system tends towards me spending 24/7 reading advertising with a limitless queue of advertising backlog, and marketers defending it saying it's legitimate because they, individually, need to do marketing to survive.