Your communications staff is way out of line.

[Guest]

I just got this in the mail.







Notice the highlighted sentence: "We just noticed you haven't opened an email from us in a long time".

The whole practice of spying on my email reading behavior (probably by inserting a link to a single-pixel image or something silly like that) is creepy and should stop. It is none of your business what I do with your emails.

Just because something is technically possible doesn't make it right to actually do it. Please explain to the person in your company who mistakenly thought that this was a good idea that it is a very bad idea to (1) spy on your customers; and (2) flaunt that ability.

Edited October 14, 2023 by reddish

[David Digilent]

Hey Reddish,

David here, Digilent's Marketing Manager. Thanks for expressing your feedback! We actually love a good critical forum post because it helps us put things in perspective. 

I'd like to fill in the context for this particular email, and provide transparency. This is a common practice in likely most email you have ever received from most companies. We look at simple metrics like the percentage of customers opening emails, and the percentage of times that certain pieces of content get clicked so we can know if it's genuinely useful or not to you all. 

The entire purpose of this automated email is to, ironically, not bother people. It's sent to folks who have been receiving our emails but haven't interacted with them in some time as a last chance before we remove them from our list. In theory, if you are receiving emails from us but not interacting with them in any way (open/click), then they aren't useful. We don't want to be dead weight in your inbox, so we excuse ourselves.

I do want you to know that I value and appreciate your opinion. I also want to reassure you that we don't do anything nefarious with this common metric information other than "customer open = good; customer don't open = bad". 

Cheers, and keep up the good work in our forum community!

[Guest]

> This is a common practice in likely most email you have ever received from most companies.

I don't care if it is a common practice. "Everybody does it" is such a lame and lazy excuse; you can choose to be better than that. If you don't, that's on you.

The truth, if you can admit it, is that modern-day marketing has an unhealhy obsession with "quantifying" stuff, so you can make nice pie charts that at least suggests you're actually achieving something. As long as that kind of thing is confined to the marketing meetings, it's sort-off harmless; it doesn't add a lot of real value I think, but at least it doesn't actively piss off customers. And then you blunder your way into sending out an email like this.
 

Consider if you will the headline of the mail - which you scream out to your customers in big, bold letters:

It starts with the words "WE HATE" in big bold letters for crying out loud! Nice company you have there, who are hating stuff in big, bold, screamy letters. Real nice vibe that gives off !

And then it goes on with "... SO WE'RE EMAILING YOU ONE LAST TIME", switching tone from hyper aggressive to hyper passive-aggresive seemingly without effort.

After which, of course, you go on with the meat of the message: we're spying on you, and we need you to "interact" with us by pushing one of the buttons to make a choice, because we're seeing that you are not faithfully reading our emails.

It's the kind of thing that could be used as an example of how not to talk to your customers in Marketing 101, it's that bad.

> It's sent to folks who have been receiving our emails but haven't interacted with them 

Seriously.... I don't "interact" with an email; I either read it, or I don't. You really need to get to grips with the fact that this kind of marketing-speak is just silly outside of the meetings you're in all day.

> We don't want to be dead weight in your inbox

That's why you have the "unsubscribe" button at the bottom of each email.

Here's my perspective: I mostly like Digilent's products. I sort-of tolerate your subscription email list, because, well, the messages are not super interesting, but I occasionally see a subject line that interests me; or I may care to click on some of them once every few months or so if I'm a bit bored. Or not. This may not seem like "interacting" from your side, but this already puts you in a very select category with two or three other company mailing lists, of which I have chosen to stay subscribed. Of course, I am too busy most of the time to actually read the messages that come in, but I am, tenuously, hooked in.

The passive act of me not unsubscribing even when you make it fairly easy to do so is about the extent to which my attachment as a customer to Digilent goes. And, as indicated, that's pretty positive compared to what most companies who vie for my attention manage to achieve.

And then you come with your message: "we spy on your email reading habits, and we feel you're not giving our mails the attention they deserve", breaking that tenuous, mildly positive vibe with your hyper negative messaging and your emphasis on the privacy-invading practices that pervade modern digital marketing.

Now, by me not selecting the "I want to continue getting your mails", which I won't do for reasons that should be obvious by now, you may drop me (and others) off your mailing list unilaterally. In fact you implied you were going to do that with your "so we're emailing you one last time" message, and I would be sort of disappointed if you didn't, because that would mean you essentially lied to me when you said "we're emailing you one last time", which would be a bad look.

So go ahead, and I won't really shed a tear - the mailing list is not that good. But that means you guys actively choose to cut a weak but active communications channel, and from a marketing perspective that just seems like a really stupid course of action.

So, given all that: If you still can't see what's wrong with the email you sent out, I guess we just don't have enough common ground to have a discussion.

Edited October 17, 2023 by reddish

[David Digilent]

Hi Reddish,

Noted on the messaging in the email. I've made it a bit more clear for future sends and doubled the amount of time before this automated email sends. Thanks for being a user and for giving actionable feedback.

[Guest]

> I've made it a bit more clear for future sends and doubled the amount of time before this automated email sends.

Have fun with the pie charts, I guess.

[David Digilent]

I love pie charts.

[Guest]

If only you loved your customers too.