To me an email survey is not personal. If you actually wrote an email to me, saying "Hey Joe, I see that you're doing x, y and z. What can I do to make your experience better?" which is written to me for me and not generic, that's establishing a relationship. I've gotten a hand written card from Fab.com founder Jason Goldberg which I've kept because that is personal.

Don't know why you're getting downvoted, this is spot on. Machines talking to me like we went to high school together is one of my great peeves of the modern era.

On that note, do realize that the vast majority of personalized hand-written cards you receive are written by taskrabbits who are trying to give that "personal" touch [1].

Mixpanel is one of the worst offenders of faux-personalized email. "I see you logged on today - were you able to accomplish what you wanted?" "I noticed that you were checking out the funnels feature. Can we set up a time to chat?" Go away.

[1] https://www.taskrabbit.com/sf-bay-area/search?search=handwri...

I honestly don't see why this is a bad thing. Would you prefer the automated emails?

If you were on the other side of the equation, how would you deal with trying to get real feedback about your product? To me, it's fair to thing a company that's goes through the expense and effort to have a real person (taskrabbit or not) contact me deserves just a bit more consideration.

I'm saying that those emails are automated - triggered upon a series of click events as part of a "customer lifecycle management" plan. They are just written to sound personalized ("I noticed that...") but to me, are no less spammy than anything else.

Funny results of this are the fact that I'll be working on something over the weekend, trigger one of these automated messages, and email a response: "Oh yeah, I had a question, thanks for noticing!" Naturally I don't hear back until some time the following week.

It is always hard getting real feedback about your product. But a message like "Hey, you just joined, and I think you could do a better job with the way you structure your sales data" - because a human had looked at our business, looked at the way we used their product, and spent a moment trying to come up with a way to be helpful - would be way cooler to me than an automated tripwire.

For me, part of the reason the handwritten notes (shifting away from email for a moment) resonate with us is because we feel like an employee of the company - a grateful, hard-working employee - decided to spend their time painstakingly writing me a personalized note. That's why we write cards to our loved ones over the holidays.

But when you can pay someone to do that, then the CEO doesn't care - they're just factoring it into the customer acquisition cost. Which is totally okay. But it is equivalent to saying "I don't mind paying higher prices for Apple products because the unboxing experience is so great."