Email marketing to developers
Do developers really hate emails or is it just because we're all guilty of spamming a barrage of mediocre updates that don't really matter?
One of the senior devs on a former team had a habit of letting his iOS email app grow to 9,999 unread emails on his work account. He liked that red iOS bubble flex. He'd then open Gmail, delete all emails, and let the cycle start again.
If it's important enough they'll Slack me, he'd say, most of it is just newsletters, marketing, spam, and Renovate updates anyways.
I didn't think much of it until recently, when I was catching up with someone in another dev tooling company in charge of CRM and Email Marketing, and found out that they were struggling with atrocious email stats. On average they'd get 7-9% open rates, and even though the total subscriber base was under 10,000, a good 80-90 would unsubscribe every month, with several others marking the emails as spam.
This turned into quite the discussion on our Developer Marketing Slack, where everyone shared their best practices for emails to developer audiences, and I shared a summary of what worked and didn't work when I faced the same issues back at Hygraph.
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