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Comment by BrianEatWorld | Hacker News Reader

I got stuck with marketing emails for my start-up and I take a bit of an issue with point one.

How is it the sender's fault if you can't remember why you signed up for an email?

As a matter of best practices, I do remind subscribers. However, it is also quite irritating to be marked as spam, when it was the user who signed up for my messages. By all means unsubscribe, but marking me as spam, especially because I use the highly spam averse Mailchimp is a mean thing to do. Its particularly mean if its just because you forgot what you signed up for.

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Just because your boss asked you to do something that many people HATE, doesn't make it better.

People handing over their email address in exchange for user registration or to gain access to a trial version of your product are not interested in receiving sporadic advertising for the next N years.

People are inundated by unwanted email every day, from companies that claim, like Dracula, "but you said I could come inside." Some people don't mind, but some of your target customers will already have very negative reactions to ANY marketing email, so it is incredibly important that you go out of your way to make it clear that you are trying to communicate something that will benefit the recipient, not just a sales pitch you can justify legally sending them.

This. I'm so sick of receiving marketing emails from companies to whom I sent a one-time informational query, not to mention the marketing emails sent to addresses gleaned from public directories like Jigsaw (of which I am _not_ a member).

Not sure about others on HN, but for example when I come across an interesting project on HN that has a sign-up page to be reminded when they open I will sign up. I generally won't receive messages for X amount of weeks, and out of the blue I'll get an email. In that email let me know who you are, and what made you interesting enough for me to most likely sign up for your mailing list.

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