Oh boy, the shit marketers do to get our emails…

"Oh boy, the shit consumers click on...."

At one of my old jobs we had this annoying offer that appeared all over the site; it was confusing, convoluted, and presented in obnoxious ways. We all (marketing folks) hated it. Every damn time we experimented with turning it off, revenue went down.

"If only users would stop clicking the damn thing and stop handing money over to us because of that click, we could finally turn it off!!"

(A bit of an oversimplification, as I know it did some damage to the brand. But the point still stands: Most marketers today live and die by testing -> measuring -> dumping money/effort into anything that catches fire. We're not going to continue using tactics that don't produce, which means that in many cases user behavior drives our decision making.)

> in many cases user behavior drives our decision making.

Don't be too trusting of this.

From the perspective of lead segmentation I've seen countless examples of:

1.) We need a high/medium/low split so we know how to prioritize our efforts.

2.) Select something entirely based on a gut feeling and split on that.

3.) Put our best people on the high list.

4.) High list performs better, so cement #2 as our "scientific" policy that is "backed by data".

Testing and measuring are no surrogate for integrity.

There live a whole lotta tactics and activities between "ah, we don't like this promotion" and "this is not ethical."

You've got to market your product if you want people to know about it. Assuming you're a hacker/maker, just building a product and hoping people will magically find it isn't a real strategy.

You can market your product in a more honest way, i.e. adding a checkbox for promotion emails. In some countries this is actually the law.

You mean my side project, superawesomecrazyfuntime.heroku.com, will never make money unless I tell people about it!? How absurd, good day sir... I say good day.

Ansible probably counts as an example too.