Not many marketers perhaps in this thread, so here's mine.
Dynamics 365: millions of unwanted features that bloats the system. Very complex where it shouldn't be, poor search features... Could go on and on. On par with Salesforce in my opinion.
Marketo: entreprise software that was probably good 10 years ago. Nothing has changed since then. UX/UI is shameful. Landing page builder is just a joke. Not being able to write custom objects from a form defeats the purpose of using an advanced tool like this.
So what happens to all these albums we've bought on the iTunes Store? Despite the money we've poured in, we are on the same level than the next kid who just joined the Apple Music streaming service last month? That will push people to reconsider their loyalty to the company and their service.
My guess to what the GP is asking is if the files will still be downloadable from Apple even if they are not selling the tracks anymore. My reading of the article, makes the answer to that question vague, saying:
“But you can always go back and listen to the downloads, they always will work,”
Does that mean if you still have the files, they will work (which is obviously the case) or does that mean they are available to download at anytime once bought from Apple, but will not be available to be purchased in the future...
The only problem I have with Bandcamp is that there are already some many good artists / music on Spotify. It's hard to take a stab at a more "amateur" market - it's not like we are running out of pro musicians to listen to. It's a shame because Bandcamp is actually pretty cool.
When Spotify takes the next step of their "incredible journey", I want to have more than memories of the great music I found. So I buy music on Bandcamp. And make backups.
But where is the Bandcamp player that competes with Spotify's web player? Bandcamp needs a better player that I can enjoy using all day & in which I can build playlists.
As I run my own mail server, what I do is always creating an alias, usually named after the website I subscribe. Like expedia@mydomain.com for example.
This way I can stop unwanted mail if unsubscribe does'nt work by deleting the alias.
It also help to see who is selling your email.
For example, some years ago, I had the problem with bitdefender, as I subscribed as a reseller (!).
I explained what I thought about it to my sell representative, who couldn't find a decent explanation. And stop selling their product. And destroy the alias.
Why not spamdecoy.net? It does the same thing and you never give your real email to anyone (though forward cat is open source so it's probably ok), and you don't have to set up anything before you use the temporary email.
> (though forward cat is open source so it's probably ok)
Curious about this - how can you have an 'open-source' service? I'm not compiling or running the software, and I have no idea what their software is actually doing because there's no way to verify that it's the same as what's been open-sourced...
I suspect they would use different IP addresses for deliverability depending on a single or double opt-in subscription in order to manage that risk. That would be the sensible think to do at least.
That might work against the primitive RBLs like SpamHaus, that rely on DNS-style blacklisting.
In the world of carrier-grade email providers, they outsource spam scoring to one (or more) of a selection of about 3 vendors (Symantec, CloudMark come to mind). These systems also score against the sending domain, among a number of other factors. Source: my best friend is a lead engineer at a carrier-grade email provider.
And playing whack-a-mole with changing sending domains is ill advised as that will lose the benefit of any whitelisting occurring client side.
ISPs/free email at scale (Gmail, etc). Think billions of messages per day. Or where the majority of any audience of an email list receives their email.
As a marketer, one of the issues I run into is to subscribe someone, who filled a contact form on my website, to an email automation series (usually to nudge them towards taking an extra action while we scramble to get back to them). Problem is, once the user filled up the contact form to make an enquiry, he is unlikely to go to his/her inbox to confirm... a subscription link.
I do think double opt-in is the way forward (as outlaid in the article), but having that single opt-in option for some special cases is necessary from a business point-of-view.
> Problem is, once the user filled up the contact form to make an enquiry, he is unlikely to go to his/her inbox to confirm... a subscription link.
Or, worded another way: the user really doesn't give a damn about your subscription.
If they can't be bothered enough to take a few seconds to open one e-mail message and click on a single link, then whatever you're offering obviously isn't something that they actually want.
As a non-marketer, it seems to me that marketers would want something like double opt-in -- just so that you can ensure that those on your list are people actually interested in $product. Or is it more about the quantity of users on your list and not the quality of those users?
It's because that's what each one is paid for -- and so companies end up paying too much for marketers to undercut their salesteams' effectiveness because they misaligned the incentives, pay for marketing they don't need (or even harms them!), and then sit there wondering why it's not translating into sales (or worse, saturates salespeople with duds and costs sales).
I used work in marketing and my (slightly exaggerated) opinion is you should fire everyone on your marketing team, hire more salespeople, a socialmedia person, and maybe a single dedicated person to track overall sales performance.
But what's the point of marketing? You should be selling from that first contact -- and if you have two teams doing the same job with differing incentive structures, no wonder your organization is inefficient and pulling at different goals.
As a non-marketer, you presumably have not had the experience of customers being mad at you because they thought they signed up for something but never got it.
Email marketing has got to be one of the top "HN readers are not like most people" subjects that get discussed here. Most people do not go through life in a defensive crouch about their email inbox. They sign up for things on a whim and then unsubscribe if they don't like it.
Double opt-in works well for some audiences but definitely not for all. And BTW it's been possible to operate Mailchimp as single opt-in via API calls for a while now.
> customers being mad at you because they thought they signed up for something but never got it.
Yea, the customers never got it because 10 other people on your domain reported it as spam and the whole thing gets black flagged on the server and dropped at the SMTP connector.
This entire thread says one thing.
"Marketing emails are dead, Mailchimp is trying to boost their numbers so they can sell before everyone else realizes it"
This doesn't really affect the scenario you mentioned.
Previously users entered their email just once, and had to confirm newsletter subscription via email. They didn't need to fill in a second form or anything, just confirm they wanted to sign up by clicking a link on an email they get.
Dynamics 365: millions of unwanted features that bloats the system. Very complex where it shouldn't be, poor search features... Could go on and on. On par with Salesforce in my opinion.
Marketo: entreprise software that was probably good 10 years ago. Nothing has changed since then. UX/UI is shameful. Landing page builder is just a joke. Not being able to write custom objects from a form defeats the purpose of using an advanced tool like this.
Also... Concur?