this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2023
198 points (98.5% liked)
Asklemmy
43917 readers
1436 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy π
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Can you elaborate a bit on this?
If I'm understanding you correctly, you send out marketing stuff via email, and then you call the ones who clicked through to the landing page did whatever?
Not the person you are replying to you, but I used to do email marketing for JP Morgan long time ago and we could provide heat maps of where people's mouses were hovering most of the time on our emails and people higher up than me would use that information to tell me where to lay out the links so that people might accidentally click links and get a better click-through rate
nowadays, fwiw, a lot of software filters out scam, accidental, bot, and rageclicks, because you want to prioritize actual buying intent.
yes. Some of the data is anonymized but there are ways around it (i.e. someone downloaded something at 2am and they were the only user, I can work out it's you from the time stamps)
But I can watch your mouse move around the screen as if I was filming you with my phone (obviously only your mouse pointer, I can't see your other windows or into your bedroom etc)
edit: you were asking something slightly different, yes I absolutely can see if you clicked on my email.
For some big important people, I can even get a push notification to my phone if you visit my webpage.
I understand how it works, I'm really just surprised that you're talking about it the way you are - like this is some amazing skill set employed by "professional marketers".
Not my mouse obviously because hotjar will obey "do not track" flags from browsers, but ublock will prevent the hotjar script from loading, and prevent sending any telemetry.
edit: actually I think my main point is that you would call hapless fools that clicked through. IMO this crosses the line from being a spammer to some thing more... scammy. When someone clicks on a link in your email most of them are not aware that their action will be used to profile them as a hotter lead.
I dont know what you mean by "the way i'm talking about it" I'm just describing the function to someone who was unfamiliar with the technology.
Yes, if you deliberately block a piece of software it doesn't work. I was using "I can see your" to mean "I can see any given person's" with the caveat of that person not deliberately blocking it, I figured that was taken as read.
There's more to building out this kind of functionality, including dynamic IDs on clickable elements, A/B testing colors, CTA text, dynamic personalization, client mini-sites, first- and last- click attribution, full funnel attribution, lead scoring and so on...
None of it is crazy if you know how to do it, same with fixing a car, building a cabinet, coding an app or cooking a meal.
However, it's interesting to me that you scorn how obvious this technology is and easy to use, and then close that most people don't know about email pixels, cookies (or cookieless server side tracking), and lead scoring. But to call it "scammy" like I'm doing something that literally every business does, including mom and pop stores and amateur dramatic societies, is a little unfair.
Don't shoot the messenger, I'm just talking about what happens in general terms.
Most businesses do not spam potential customers. Any business that provides actual value to its customers doesn't need to do this.
Honestly it's infuriating that you think these shady sales tactics are normal or appropriate.
As an aside, marketing involves augmenting products and services so they're better embraced by various markets.
Sending emails is something else.
I'm curious about this. Can you name a B2B company that doesn't?
Depends on how you define spam. A few personalised emails (maybe they were missed? happened to me) with an opt out button, an opt in button and a personalised landing page are nothing crazy.
However it becomes crazy when you track mouse movements, send twelve mails in six weeks, employ 'dark' surveillance marketing tactics and relentlessly bite the leg of anyone who remotely looks like they can be pressured into a contract.
So sending a few emails is fine in a business context, but @funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works's company is way overdoing it.
I guess the context is important, and I'm willing to admit that I'm an idealist with unrealistic expectations, but if there's something being sold and it's not something I requested then it's spam IMO, even in a business context.
They're never personalised. Anyone who knows me well enough to actually "personalise" an email would just call.
I would be way more wary about someone I don't personally know selling me something via phone than via mail.
Marketers and sales people do call frequently. Most businesses have teams of people dedicated to calling.
People who work at businesses also get calls all the time. I'd be extremely surprised if any businesses didn't get phone calls. I find all these really strong reactions very odd. As everything is mobile phone nowadays its more individual but since the invention of the telephone, receptionists and telephone operators were full time jobs.
People are acting like it's cruel and unusual to phone someone, yet people have been doing it for hundreds of years.
Everyone's jumping on this "12 times in 2 weeks" thing. I think you should count the number of emails you get from certain companies and I think you'll find that any sufficiently large company has emailed you more than 12 times.
Amazon emailed me 15 times this week alone. LinkedIn Emailed me 50 times in August.
But you're already a customer. They didn't cold mail you and they respect opt outs. I suspect your company doesn't have a simple 'I don't want these emails' link.
Because you enabled notifications. Again, they didn't mail you without having a prior relationship with you and you can easily opt out.
Don't act like you're better than those two companies just because you send mails just like them. I don't think that cold calling or mailing people is wrong, just predatory practices like you described.
Don't be discouraged to discuss this further though. Just because people have a different opinion than you doesn't mean that either party is right or wrong.
well you are wrong, I do have that, its at the top and bottom of evrry email (edit for clarity: the top link is often handled by the email client, not hard-coded by me, under some circumstances it doesnt always appear, but the footer one always does) as well as a link to our privacy policy, as it's mandated by CAN-SPAM amongst others, and we have further options if the company is flagged as needing HIPAA, GDPR, GLB, CCPA etc - which also trigger different email headers and footers.
I even have a weekly automated pass of replies to emails to check for common phrases indicating they want out like "unsub" "do not" "please stop"
I once had to pull a(n old, different) company out of email blacklists by working very technically with SPF/DKIM/DMARC engineers and issue whole new security certificates across a wide range of web domains so I know full well the impact of non compliance
Nice, sounds good that you allow unwilling customers to opt out easily. Didn't expect that one.
I personally know how most of that works, but as a software developer I would refuse or tone it waaaaaay down if someone wanted me to code something like that. Most of that is unnecessary and evil, and probably illegal in some countries.
If I had to code something like this I would have a call to action button with a signup for more info and possibly a personalised email with a personalised landing page. You don't need to surveil someone to know if they are interested in your product.
Thank you for the insights into your industry.
I really think a lot of people here are blowing this out of proportion. I don't see how whether testing if red or green is better is "evil."
Or knowing if people click on the button on the top level menu, or the hero banner is "evil."
I think that's a touch hyperbolic.
But also, you say "personalized landing page" as if that's different. But you just designated "tracking" as "evil" - that's what personalization is. What you proposed as an alternative is just as "evil" as the general functions of a website.
That's not what I have an issue with. I specifically told you which behaviour I find acceptable and which I don't find acceptable. If you didn't read that, I'll just repeat it for you:
I'm willing to bet there are very few sites you interact with that don't use this technology in a way, including Lemmy.
Where does Lemmy use this technology? Or did you mean apart from Lemmy there's not many sites?
If I notice sites employing stuff like that which isn't blocked by ublock I will most likely stop using them unless they're insanely useful.
You're not talking to a regular user here. I know how the web works and what tracking and fingerprinting is. Please stop trying to normalise predatory web design practices. You already landed on Lemmy, so you get a taste of what a web without surveillance capitalism could look like.
Maybe think about what tools you really need and what tools don't really give you benefits that outweigh the invasion of privacy of your users.
Lemmy uses Cloudflare Insights on a bunch of instances.
Again, it's not about what I want, if I'm to submit a request to internal IT from the marketing dept to discontinue use of a paid product, I have to submit a legitimate use case as to why the company should abandon it, it's going to look pretty suspicious and eventually someone will ask why we can't do all the stuff we used to do, and there is no business-centric use case to decomission analytics, only a personal preference, which would be at odds to the functions of a standard marketing department.