> FooCorp made numerous attempts to improve their business relationship with Bob, despite the risk of annoying Bob. They can justify this by pointing to observable evidence that, if they mail 100 Bobs, statistically Bobs actually do start using the FooSoft, and (anecdotally) their customer support team gets emails and blog posts saying "Thanks for being so attentive to my needs!!1"

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.