Sure, You Should Remind Your Users Your Service Exists but How Frequently?

The problem with the online industry is that there are virtually no certain and time-proved rules for anything that you can do if you do your business online – simply because the industry has not had enough time to mature. And even if there are dedicated books published and experts teaching how to launch startups successfully and exactly what should be done to achieve the goals for the startup, the problem is that only a few books and experts have actually managed to turn into real authorities that everyone believes (similar to what we have with Kotler in the traditional marketing world, for example).

An additional risk factor is that those people who venture to launch startups rarely actually read even those books that are available or listen to the experts – because everyone hopes to be no less of an expert anyway. As a result, we sometimes face situations where entrepreneurs do all kinds of things that make their users raise their eyebrows in surprise.

And while initial PR on the launch day is probably the area where the vast majority of startups fail because they are unable to communicate their message to the press people and the blogosphere, at least a very limited circle of people will see their pitches, press releases, and official announcements. As a result, mistakes in this area often remain unnoticed.

But mistakes in the field of community building and management are much more difficult to hide – simply because these mistakes reach many or all of the startup’s users. Yet this is where I sometimes see the strangest actions of all – and some of the examples I just can’t keep silent about – and hopefully it will prevent some of the emerging startups from repeating the mistakes.

My major concern is in the amount of communications that a startup sends to their users by default. Yes, those numerous emails that many of us never even open and frequently simply “mark as read” instead of reading. The most advanced startups give us a chance of choosing how many such emails we actually want to receive and provide us with a link to customize the notification options right in the email.

But many startups simply decide themselves how frequently they will communicate to their users – with various newsletters (detailing new features or some achievements) or notifications related to activities of the user in the service. And once they make their decision, a user can hardly change anything at all – but skip the “not-really-that-much-wanted” emails.

Now of course I know that every startup wants to remind its users of the startup existence – especially if the users only registered to test the service and leave forever. And while in some cases such notifications are more than reasonable (when a user gets a friend request or receives a new message from another user, for example), in other cases I can’t help but wonder why the startups still send such messages to their users and if they really expect to get anything but irritation back.

I am not the type of the early adopter who will test absolutely every new service that is launched but I am probably pretty active with new startups as I hear about new services that I either want to actually use or review here on Profy (or both). But of course there is only a handful of services that I actually use – yet the vast majority of those that I have tested and forgotten seem to be totally determined to get me back to do something again so they keep bombarding me with their notifications without realizing I am not coming back – unless they have an interesting announcement worth checking them again. Unfortunately these notifications often make me unsubscribe entirely – so I will never even learn of their new developments (even though such announcements would have been totally welcome in a monthly newsletter).

One of the worst examples of this behavior is Yammer – the corporate Twitter builder that managed to win at TechCrunch 50 last year. The blogosphere asked many questions about how valuable and needed such a service may be and while it obviously got some supporters, their number probably was not enough to ensure stable growth and development of the service. Of course I registered for the service myself to write a review and left for good – simply because I don’t have any colleagues in Profy who I could use it with (not to mention that I don’t really see myself using it at all – but this is nothing but my personal preference).

Yet some time after the launch Yammer came up with a very creative idea of trying to drag those numerous people who registered following the TechCrunch 50 buzz – they began asking one simple question “What’s new at Profy?” by email reminding me that I have not updated my status on Yammer for a while and probably should – to let my colleagues know what I am up to. The worst part is that they send such emails every single week – probably to make sure one week I will unsubscribe and remove my account completely. So here I would like to answer in public to Yammer that everything is totally fine at Profy but I don’t think I should use Yammer to talk to myself. Honestly, I can hardly imagine a mess that could result of Twitter reminding all the users who don’t update their statuses that they should.

Another totally outrageous example is one online language learning startup that I don’t really want to mention (and link to) properly here. When it launched, I decided to register myself as a provider of learning services (simply because I speak two languages and it seemed to be a good way to test the service) and after playing with the service for a while I left it – certainly without any intention of teaching someone because while I do have relevant experience, it was not the most exciting thing in my life at all to want to continue with it.

This was a few months ago and since then the service has been sending me occasional reminder emails to bring me back and complete registration as the teacher (submit some courses, edit my CV and do a whole lot of things I certainly have no time for). And since my inbox is full of similar reminders, I did not mind simply skipping and deleting them. But imagine my surprise when I had someone from the service adding me as a contact on Skype (I probably indicated my Skype account during registration) and inviting me to contact this person should I have any questions regarding my future use of the service. Should I mention I preferred to ignore the person as my Skype contact list is already crowded enough not to add representatives of services I will never use there?

Of course I do realize that when I register for a new service and provide the service owners with my email and other contact details, I invariably risk some sort of intrusion in my life and should expect it sooner or later. But should there really be no limits to how a startup treats users and subscribers? Now I know that you will hardly find any ultimate guide on community management where all the proper steps will be detailed and all the potential mistakes will be explained, but does that really mean that such mistakes cannot be prevented at all? After all, in the vast majority of situations common sense is totally enough to act reasonably.