Why else would a company waste time and money on life cycle emails if they didn't work?
They have a nonzero rate of return. You are hating the player, and not the game. Humans are error prone, forgetful beings. An email reminder can often times engage them into something they intended to do but simply forgot, or became too busy to complete. In this act of reminding there is also a non zero rate of pissing off end users. The advantages obviously outweigh the disadvantages or it wouldn't be done.
I shrug and move on. There will always be an endless cycle of advertising and marketing surrounding you. The entirety of the economy depends upon getting you to exchange currency for productivity.
> Today, lifecycle emails are the state-of-the-art in customer engagement. Immediately after a user signs up, they receive an email. A few days after creating an account, they receive another email. A week later, email; then a month later, email; if they haven’t logged in, email.
And thought this article was going to be about how annoying these spammy emails were. Nope, quite the opposite.
The CAN-SPAM act really needs to be updated to take into account a lot of this BS or at the very least some of the mail providers should provide more protection from this. Google has gone a step in the right direction in Gmail.
One rule I would love is that newsletters are legally required to be opt-in, never opt-out or worse yet, no option at all given. Asking users to set their email settings upon signup would be another good one. Forcing companies to add this step to their signup flow would require them to think wisely about how many dozens of types of emails they are going to try to inundate their users with, and only choose those that really matter for the user to get utility from their product/service.
Long term these tactics actually hurt the entire ecosystem because users become wary of the consequences of trying out for a service. TBH I'm getting to the point where I want the signup page to show that they make available a delete account page before I sign up. I don't like the fact that when I stop using a service that my information ends up sitting on their servers for all eternity. It should delete all information within reason and anonymize any information which has been recorded in places where deleting it will degrade the service for other users.
This article is nothing more than a diatribe by a spammer who's upset that Gmail's new feature makes it harder to get his spam into my inbox.
And let me preempt the CEO of a startup who's sure to reply, telling me that THEIR product is good, and that THEIR users actually want to read the spam. Everyone thinks their special-snowflake emails are the exception, but that's almost universally delusional.
If you're sending more than a single confirmation email that the user has not EXPLICITLY requested then you are part of the problem.