I'd like to jump in and clarify a few things. First, we have recently been testing the frequency of our email sending, and the author seems to have been bucketed into the "more frequent" group. That being said, we were actually planning on reducing the frequency of what we emailed the author by roughly 25%, including eliminating the "Your website misses you" and the "It’s been 8 days, 2 hours, 30 minutes and 6 seconds…" emails, among others. I just fast-tracked this and it's now live, so our email volume when you sign up is now much lower.
Second, we put a lot of effort into trying to send personalized email communication that is specific to your use case, but it looks like we missed a very important group, contributors to others' sites. This was a mistake. These emails may make sense if you were starting your own site, but they certainly don't make sense if you were just contributing to someone else's. I'm going to make sure we revise that set of emails within 2 weeks to something more appropriate and even less frequent.
Last, as many here are correct to assume, we are constantly testing and refining our email communications. I think it's helpful to understand our customer's psychology when they are signing up for Weebly, it is instructive in understanding our thought process and why we send the emails we do.
Most of our customers (60%) consider themselves entrepreneurs. They are bringing a new idea to life, things like chairigami.com, themintspace.com, stealthelectricbikesusa.com or weeknightbite.com. They are quitting their full-time jobs to do this and it's a very frightening process.
Creating their site is especially daunting and difficult for them, even though it's so crucial to their success. Many of them start the process, want to finish, but give up. We've found that the first week is the most crucial. In our email communications, it's our goal to try to help them across the finish line to a high-quality site.
In this case, we were emailing too often, and we've stopped doing that. In general, most of our users do appreciate some help and encouragement along the way, and we will keep testing emails to try to make that as effective, helpful, and non-annoying as possible.
It's fascinating that even after presumably reading this HN discussion, you would still write things like "reducing the frequency...by roughly 25%" and "we were emailing a bit too often", followed by things like "email volume...is now much lower" and "non-annoying as possible". Lots of people here are trying to tell you something that could help your business, something that has very little to do with the precise number of mails you're sending, and you don't seem to be seeing it at all.
Around the same time you posted this comment, I just edited my post to clarify that we were already planning on removing many of the annoying emails, including the "Your website misses you" and the "It’s been 8 days, 2 hours, 30 minutes and 6 seconds…" emails, among others.
I also just edited "we were emailing a bit too often" because it was more than a bit, it was straight up too often.
If there's something I'm still not seeing, I'd love to hear your feedback.
My point was that at the time I posted, numerous comments in this HN discussion essentially said "You're being spammy and abusing the trust of users", and to me, your comment read as "No problem, we're fine-tuning the ways we spam people so now we're only going to indulge in 75% as much unwanted harassment while abusing the trust of this particular group of users, and that makes it all OK".
To be fair, maybe I just saw your post at an unfortunate mid-edit stage, or maybe I'm just in an unusually bad mood for some reason and I loathe spammers. But honestly, at the time it read like one of those non-apology apologies that is only ever given by shady organisations you want nothing to do with. :-(
Either you are typing from your phone or I'm lost in today kids' lingo, but I don't understand what "are you sing to bump people into action" means.
In any case, I'd like to point out to the parent comment that jumping into a thread in which people is calling your company spammy and using sentences such as "In our email communications, it's our goal to try to help (our customers) across the finish line to a high-quality site" along with the name-dropping in "We are working with entrepreneurs such as X.com, Y.com and Z.com" is not really supporting their case. At first I learned that they might spam me. Now I also learned that they are likely to forward my problems to PR instead of the tech department.
Second, we put a lot of effort into trying to send personalized email communication that is specific to your use case, but it looks like we missed a very important group, contributors to others' sites. This was a mistake. These emails may make sense if you were starting your own site, but they certainly don't make sense if you were just contributing to someone else's. I'm going to make sure we revise that set of emails within 2 weeks to something more appropriate and even less frequent.
Last, as many here are correct to assume, we are constantly testing and refining our email communications. I think it's helpful to understand our customer's psychology when they are signing up for Weebly, it is instructive in understanding our thought process and why we send the emails we do.
Most of our customers (60%) consider themselves entrepreneurs. They are bringing a new idea to life, things like chairigami.com, themintspace.com, stealthelectricbikesusa.com or weeknightbite.com. They are quitting their full-time jobs to do this and it's a very frightening process.
Creating their site is especially daunting and difficult for them, even though it's so crucial to their success. Many of them start the process, want to finish, but give up. We've found that the first week is the most crucial. In our email communications, it's our goal to try to help them across the finish line to a high-quality site.
In this case, we were emailing too often, and we've stopped doing that. In general, most of our users do appreciate some help and encouragement along the way, and we will keep testing emails to try to make that as effective, helpful, and non-annoying as possible.