Comment by cs02rm0
1 day ago
> At our CORE, our instinct is to only email folks when we actually have something fun to share. A big release, something we’re excited about, news worth your time. That’d probably be every couple of months, if that. Respectful. Low noise.
Low noise for some fonts is zero emails. In the nicest way possible, users aren't excited about your big release, they're just not.
This is a simple case of "we" and "you" having different points of view. Sure, "we" think we have something fun to share, big news, we haven't emailed in a couple of months so users are probably anxious to hear from us. "You," the user, is getting 20 emails a day from people who think they are sharing something fun, only emailing every couple of months. They're flagging all that as spam, and that's why Gmail won't send your spam anymore.
About the clearest case of "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
Zero emails is not low noise - it's zero noise. I agree that I sometimes want zero noise from companies whose products I am using...and also it depends on what is in the noise? Sometimes I find unexpected signal.
I would say that email is inherently a somewhat noisy channel. You have little meta-data about how appropriate and timely a message is, so often you are sending in the dark. There are many downsides to the protocol and its place in our lives but it does carry a lot of important communication.
Basically...I just don't know what communication medium would allow a company that makes app icons to keep their customers in the loop about updates & concerns related to the product. Are you gonna install a Font Awesome app?
> Basically...I just don't know what communication medium would allow a company that makes app icons to keep their customers in the loop about updates & concerns related to the product. Are you gonna install a Font Awesome app?
What companies _used_ to do is have "Subscribe to our newsletter" on their site - either for non-account holders, or as a separate checkbox when setting up an account.
Same with email frequency — would be trivial to add "when do you want to hear from us?" as a question "when we release a new font / when we make changes to a font you've purcahsed / only account related".
We have the patterns for all this already established.
Easy, let the user opt in to email updates about new products, rather than automatically "opting" them in when you force them to use their email to create an account