Using Creative Cold Emails to Acquire Customers | Hacker News Reader

Using Creative Cold Emails to Acquire Customers

starterstory.com

14 pointspatwalls13 comments

I'm so tired of all this automated cold email/calling bullshit. It's way out of hand and well beyond levels that led to the Do Not Call Registry. If your business relies on buying emails lists from shady 3rd-party data partners and blasting them, I do not want to do business with you. Ever.

If I did not give you my email address, I do not want your emails. If I did not give you my phone number, I do not want to talk to you. Stop wasting my incredibly valuable time.

Want my business? Do the work to earn it rather than sending templated crap from a CRM.

I'd just like to note this does not pass the golden rule. If every company spent hours to make "relevant" emails that got past spam filters and into all of our inboxes, then our inboxes would be full of "relevant" emails that we generally are not interested in and would be crowding out our actually important ones. We'd all be wasting much more of our precious time wading through marketing pitches to use our email.

To me this is the worst part about "growth hacking". If you are going to grow your business by being a higher scale spammer, ok, but just don't go bragging about it. You are stealing tons of people's attention and time for a very small percentage of them that will go on to be a customer. What percentage of people unsubscribe from the emails? What percent report it as spam? What percent send you angry responses because your sales tactic made their day a little worse? Those metrics seem to be missing from the story.

At least the person who knocks on my door to sell me something is wasting more of their own time than my time. By doing sales in this automated way, you are making a way to steal much more of their time than your time. The fact that you went slightly above the lowest common denominator doesn't make it right.

And again, sales is a dirty business and this is certainly not out of the ordinary. But have the decency not to brag about it. Nor brag about it so much that another "growth hacking" website re-publishes the story as a way to do their own growth hacking.

The quality of the spam does not affect its status as spam. These people make the internet worse.

Any unsolicited email is automatically spam, even if the end recipient found value in it and did end up buying the product?

It is when most of these businesses are just buying lists and sending blasts through automated programs with minimal human investment in qualifying leads. If I did not give you my email address and a human is not sending the email directly, it's spam.

Yes. Unsolicited bulk email is the actual definition of spam. This whole story is about sending unsolicited bulk email.

Generally some end recipient will engage with the spam; that's why spam gets sent.

Yes, why not?

I'm sure one person out of a billion has bought viagra from a spam email, it doesn't mean all of those were fine.

There is no cut and dry rule, but here is a simple heuristic that will apply to most emails you write and receive: If it takes longer to write it than it does to read it, it isn't spam. This metric also generally applies to cold emails as well. However, once you start automating emails then it is a slippery slope and you'll very quickly end up in the spam range.

The rule is "is it bulk? is it unsolicited?" this is long established.

"Well, there's spam-egg-sausage-and-spam, that's not got much spam in it."

"finding email addresses"... unless they're on the company's website and are supposed to be contacted for possible sales, this is called spamming.

I get lots of 'creative spam' daily. Drip campaigns. Wanting to 'set up a call' and 'how about Thursday at 2pm'. When you ask where they got your email, it's always 'LinkedIn', 'from a mutual contact', or 'I just guessed it'. No, you didn't. You bought it from a shady list reseller who hacked and scraped it together.

For most folks, mark them as spam and forget about it. If you want to get more involved, report them to their upstream web host for spamming (which will be against the terms of service). Maybe call them out on social media for being an unethical company others should avoid.

Most companies generally protect their logo with very strict intellectual property devices. I suspect that a very small number of recipients would have a very big problem with someone else incorporating their logo into third party marketing material. More specifically, they might get the impression that these shirts are already produced somewhere laying in a warehouse to be sold to anyone who wants them without their permission. They might not like that.

This is the the most creative spam I have ever seen.

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