While the rightfulness question is interesting, I'll leave that to others to discuss and go right on to the pragmatic consequences: I am very, very, very unlikely to sign up for a service "just to check it out", precisely because of tactics like this. Even if I do, I will give them a unique email alias that I can disable at will (reject at SMTP envelope stage), and that I keep records of, so that if I get annoyed enough (typically, if their unsubscribe doesn't work or doesn't exist), I will keep a record of them as company, never, ever to do business with.

I don't believe it should be marked as spam (I opted in), but it's also not something I feel should be encouraged.

When you sign up to evaluate something, you're kicking off a sales and evaluation process.

If you are at a restaurant and a good waiter notices that you're picking at some crackers instead of eating your meal, it's normal for them to approach you and see if everything is ok with your meal. You may not want to talk to the waiter, but his job is to make you satisfied with your meal, tip him, and return to the restaurant.

If you ask to waiter to leave you alone and he persists, that's a problem that should be addressed. Likewise, if you don't want to hear from <Vendor X>, you should make your feelings known and get an appropriate response.

1. the waiter is a real person.

2. the waiter was able to identify a potential issue (the customer was not eating), unlike the e-mail script, which only triggers after a set time period of not logging in. The situation would be more analogous to me taking 30 minutes to eat my meal at a restaurant when the average sit time is 20, and the waiter coming over at exactly 30 minutes and telling me 'did you know that it's been 30 minutes and 7 seconds since you've been seated? if there's anything I can do to help you finish your meal, please don't hesitate to contact me!'

But what if the waiter visits your house, asking you why you haven't been to the restaurant in a week? I'm sure that I haven't opted in to that, even if my address is on my checks.

Coincidentally or not, you've just explained why spammers spam. Not that I disagree with you.

Spam, on the other hand, is far to the other extreme. Way more than 99% of recipients don't find those emails useful (not to mention they were unsolicited emails).

e.g. "After 26 days, and almost 350 million e-mail messages, only 28 sales resulted" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_(electronic)#Cost-benefit...

How did you reach that conclusion?

I think Patrick is saying that, assuming most people are satisfied, it's acceptable and not at all evil if a small minority who signed up for the emails in the first place turn out to be annoyed.

Yet Bob might make a blog post and get significant exposure on a very well known technology site where many industry leaders participate - where people like me might say: "hmmm do I really want to deal with FooCorp spam when I can use similar competing services which do not seem to annoy people with spam"

There is always risk to annoying customers. You just never know how it will come back and bite you.

You make a good point that you don't want to annoy user so much that they rise up against you with torches and pitchforks, but I believe patio11's point is that the indignance of a few HNers does not compare to increasing engagement/conversion of trial users by e.g. 0.5%.

I can say from experience that this is exactly this line of thinking that lead to Zynga's viral behavior on Facebook. It also contributed to it's downfall.

The problem with this analysis is that it assumes a zero cost to an unopened email. It reductively sets this cost as "the risk of annoying Bob, who won't use us anyway." It's not as simple as that. Misusing any communication channel causes channel fatigue. This is what happened at Zynga.

At Zynga, we had a better understanding of our outbound messaging than nearly every other company in existence. Messaging, clickthrough, A/B testing, new users/activation/retention/revenue/virality by channel. We ruthlessly weeded out poor performing messaging with those that performed the best.

But when the question came up of "is this too much?" it was always cast aside. The reasoning was the same - on a macro level, users are responding to our messaging positively. Why would you send less, when sending more has a clear business benefit?

The issue is channel fatigue. Over the years, our CTRs would drop across the board. Some of these were step-function drops caused by Facebook changes, but it turns out that most of the difference over 5 years was due to Zynga's abuse of the channel. Every message that they sent to an uninterested user causes that user to trust the channel less. Every pink cow notification causes them to check that shiny red icon a little bit less.

Now, for email, there is no chance that you would send enough email to kill the channel for everyone, it's just too big. Because of that email works differently. Every crappy email you send has a cost, and that cost is measured in deliverability. There is a network of email providers, email distributors, and other companies that deal in "who's email actually gets sent". Every company & domain gets rated on their spaminess, and the worst get cut off from the email ecosystem.

If you're abusing the email channel, some of your email will get marked as spam. Email providers use this data, along with others, to determine if your email should end up in the inbox. What's also important to note is that individuals can have a huge effect on deliverability. If I'm an annoyed Bob, there's no reason for me to blog about it or go to social media. I just have to mark your emails as spam and drop a note to your email distributor to tell them that I think your email practices are abusive.

A "marked as spam" rate of 0.1% is good. That means that every "mark as spam" event counts for a lot. It only takes one annoyed Bob to put you on the email spam radar.

This is 2013, we have the ability to measure the effect of a single, extra email. We have the ability to predict our chances of reviving a user who hasn't engaged. We have the ability to make a statistically significant guess about who could re-engage and who we've lost. We should be getting smarter about email when we scale up, not spammier.

Weebly can do better than this. And if email is important to the business of Weebly, they should do better.

Many companies don't get to the point of extreme performance, but when they do suddenly new problems arise. Optimizing the hell out of one metric or multiple metrics absolutely leads to erosion in other metrics.

The metrics that involve longevity tend to get ignored, especially in a competitive market that requires companies to spend to acquire users (they also are ignored when management is pushing on short term numbers.) If they are far enough out, your company crashes. This is a problem every business faces. Warren Buffet even has a few things to say about certain industries where, over the lifetime of a business they don't turn a profit. Short term metrics can be very dangerous.

In the relationship to what you mentioned with e-mail, the company is has an incentive, by the current spam filtering "cartel" (that is a huge stretch of words, but basically Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft) to send as much email as possible! The 100 emails in the inbox of a user that doesn't market them as spam pushes that marked as spam rate down. There is certainly a threshold involved in sending email users aren't looking at at all, but what those numbers are is a hazy. The spam complaint rate, everyone in email knows.

Sending tons of unnecessary, non-personalized, irrelevant email is a branding problem.

Here's the message that Bob is receiving: "Hey Bob, here's an email about how to do that thing you wanted to do, but were too embarrassed to ask your nephew about."

Bob is going to stick with Weebly because of these emails, not despite them, and Weebly is going to continue being a product that is wildly popular with the Bobs of the world, and not so very popular with the HNers of the world. There are about 1000x more Bobs than HNers out there, so IMO the math and the messaging both check out.

I think (since we're both conjecturing about the takeaway message for the hypothetical "most people") the most interesting thing to come from this discussion would be how to do this sort of stuff tastefully.

It's hard to know how to engage! I think there is value in picking apart the techniques used in this campaign, the same way there is value in picking apart how CPU scheduling works.

After a bit of digging, it is easy to know the "things one should do for marketing." Engage, measure, test, iterate, funnel, A/B test, NPS, etc.

But what's not as widely known are what specific copywriting techniques one should use. Or how to measure the effectiveness versus email frequency. How do you decide when - or whether - or how frequently - to send a customer survey?

And no, I am not going to be a customer of theirs, but if somebody I know needs help putting together a webpage, then they would likely come to me for recommendations. Weebly might have been one of them before, now it will not be.

My guess is that most of the readers here are in the same category.

Personally, I've used Weebly, and recommended it to many people. This level of emailing only happens if a) you're in the email-frequently side of their A/B test, and b) you don't manage to publish your site. If you do manage to publish your site - which is presumably why you signed up in the first place (unless you're the OP, who is clearly a somewhat unique Weebly user) - you won't get any of these emails! I honestly can't see what all the fuss is about.