Me: "We should remove that popup"

Marketer: "But our A/B testing statistics show a 14% increase in signups to our newsletter, and people who get our newsletter are 4% more likely to buy something"

Me: "0.14x0.04... so slightly more than half a percent improvement. And you also qualitatively measured how many people decide to never visit the page again, just because of that popup? Did you measure the how many internet users with adblockers run into a broken webpage? Did you measure the amount of emails to support from users who can't unsubscribe from the newsletter because there is no unsubscribe link?"

Marketer: "Why would they want to unsubscribe? The newsletter adds value to our users!"

Me: 😩

No unsubscribe link sounds pretty scummy/illegal to me

Sometimes the best value is not being annoying. Followed by the second-best value of not being clingy. Marketers are trained to optimize for short-term returns rather than long-term goodwill. Since their metrics can't register the number of people permanently turned against their brand by their behavior (bounce rate includes a significant amount of these people, I'm sure, but they don't care) they never get to compare long-term brand reliability to short-term gains (there's rarely any systemic reward for long-term thinking anyway).

Relationships matter, and marketers rarely look beyond the superficial (even the relationships they consider "deep" ones tend to be shallow by the standards of someone observing from the outside). The amusing thing is there isn't a way to see how much better (or worse) they'd be long-term if they respected the people who weren't interested now and weren't pushy towards the people who were only mildly interested.

If you’re in the US you could show him this, because not having an unsubscribe link is a violation

https://ftc.gov/tips-advice/...

That's because marketing people are vile and disgusting creatures who are more full of shit than a latrine in rural India.

@bittersweet as you're in the EU, did you also point out that GDPR requires removal of consent to be as easy as giving it?

Nice bro

@gathurian it's definitely illegal.

Part of the CAN SPAM act (for us in the states), I do believe.

@nibor Care for a link? Couldnt find anything online a d would love for a link to passive aggressively include in all these 'Delete my Account and all associated data' mails because these fuckers will only let you deactivate your account from your profile (Looking at you AirBnB and Once)

Nevermind, found it. Art 7.3

[...]4It shall be as easy to withdraw as to give consent.[...]

https://gdpr-info.eu/art-7-gdpr/

@nibor Yeah of course.

The response was "chill, it's just a bug".

Which is true. The mailing system is fully managed by marketing now, and it's a regression bug in the way email is generated where it fails to make a distinction between account emails and newsletters. It has broken 3 times in the last year... and somehow it's very difficult for them to understand that sometimes, the presence of bugs can break laws.

Soon I will mix dead crickets and moths into the coffeemachine of the marketing department, and if they complain I'll tell them:

"chill, it's just a bug"

did they win their Marketing education in the lottery? 😧

Mr Data protection regulator, why are you fining us? Chill man, it's just a bug.

Adds value my ass

Popups nearly always cause me to close a website immediately.

@neriald Some people forget that it's those receiving the value that determine what (if any) value they have received. Of course, some people probably do get value from the newsletter, but not making it easy to stop receiving it will reduce the perception of value for a lot of people.

@powerfulparadox

They also forget that measuring all side effects of a change is hard.

Things like "we sold 5% more rubber duckies" are easy to notice and factually measure, but customer sentiment like "the rubber ducky store isn't what it used to be, they sold out man" is harder to measure.

Especially when you operate in a niche and have limited churn due to lack of alternatives, you can suddenly crash hard when a competitor opens up shop

Even when all your quantitative A/B tests showed continuous improvement, the qualitative sentiment might have taken a dive.

An example where this is extremely clear is for example travel/hotel booking websites: They do everything to make a sale happen, but usually have shitty customer service so customer loyalty ends up being very fragile.

You can optimize your sales funnel all you want, eventually you run out of population to abuse.

@bittersweet The thing is that you can fuck all people for some time, and some people the whole time, but you can't always fuck everyone.

@powerfulparadox newsletters should be opt in not the other way around.

@neriald The other day I heard a product owner say: "Let's make this feature a non-optional opt-in".

@bittersweet he should get a promotion!

@neriald I was assuming that throughout, although the context could easily mask that assumption.

most of sales and marketing teams doesn't care about the technical ends of development. They make false assumptions and in case if they got stuck some where, all blame also comes on developers.

I think the term most in start is not good. All of sales and marketing people are same.

@Fast-Nop

I thought the 'poo in the loo' meme was real.

Imagine my ignorance! Imagine my surprise!

@Wisecrack Well it is real - in San Francisco where they don't even care about having designated shitting streets.

@Fast-Nop

More a function of drug abuse than anything else.

Pennywise and pound foolish.
In more aspects than one...

I have to thank you for all least trying to help make world a better place