[edhallen]

These are great points, and speak to why measuring the impact of email is really, really important. Until you're holding your emails accountable to performance (whether it's getting someone to come back or to buy), you're just throwing darts in the air and potentially annoying someone.

At Klaviyo (I'm one of the co-founders, so note bias), we've helped many web apps and ecommerce sites setup full email strategies - and we definitely find that some emails don't work. You've got to test different emails and strategies, see what works - and then ideally optimize and personalize what (or even whether) you are sending based on individuals' actions.

[kintamanimatt]

How do you measure how pissed off I am? From your side of the table a lack of positive action is indistinguishable from absolute apathy, passive interest without action, undelivered mail (most tracking widgets fail in webmail), etc.

I've observed that some less-savvy people don't know how to unsubscribe from emails, or fear doing so will "upset someone" and so grin and bear an otherwise annoying deluge of email they never react to.

[chc]

Why should they measure how pissed off you are? Why is that data point interesting to them if it doesn't affect any of the metrics they're actually interested in, such as making more money and satisfying a higher percentage of users?

It doesn't feel great to be told you're unimportant, and no company owner will say that to their own customer, but really — you and I are not that important. I do not expect McDonald's to abolish all their meat products because they offend me as a vegetarian — the rest of their customers manifestly do not share that opinion, so it would be a dumb choice if they killed the Big Mac. Similarly, it is not in a company's best interests to terminate an objectively successful email campaign just because some random guy got pissed off but was unwilling to click Unsubscribe. Successful companies lose customers all the time for all kinds of reasons — they would never get anything done if they tried to personally appeal to every single person on earth.

[andrewflnr]

Avoiding pissing people off is a basic ethical concern, which is at least as important as making money. Obviously it can't be totally avoided, but you try anyway. If you can't make more money without pissing a bunch of people off, you should consider changing your business.

[chc]

This isn't about a bunch of people. Remember, we're talking about so few people that they don't even make a blip in any of your metrics. If you're getting angry replies or all your emails are deleted without being read or lots of people are unsubscribing, yeah, that's bad and you should think about what you've done wrong. But that's not the situation we're talking about here.

Again, McDonald's pisses off millions of vegetarians every single day. Would you say on that basis that they should go meatless? Should churches close to avoid pissing off militant atheists?

The point is not that you should be callous about offending people. Obviously it is better for all involved to make people happy, and that should always be your goal. But the point is that one or two guys saying "I'm so angry!" on an Internet forum does not mean you've failed. No matter what you do, even if it's pure charity work, you'll eventually find someone who gets upset about it. All you can do is apologize and offer to unsubscribe them — it's not rational to throw your business away on that basis.

[mtitus16]

Did you ever think that if you don't want their emails, you're not their target audience? And so they don't give a fuck how you feel?

[kintamanimatt]

Wow