Marketing emails off of polls?
15I guess it was bound to happen eventually, but getting an emailed plug to buy the recent pair of cat shirts because I previously indicated “I’m a cat person” in a daily poll seems to take more of the fun out of meh… I get it, it’s an e-commerce site, but it just seems like you’re following the standard “sales funnel” marketing techniques, and not catering as much to us deal hound iconoclasts who don’t play by the standard rules…
Oh well, c’est la vie… Guess that’s the end of my participation in the polls. 
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Wow… did they actually come right out and say that? Seems like bad form to say the least!
@chienfou Yes, they did come right out and say that. But having worked in direct marketing for a gazillion years with top retail and ecommerce clients, I love this kind of stuff.
@heartny
sort of like using a frequent shopper/bonus card and then bitching they are tracking your purchases…
I assumed they’d eventually steal all our identities from poll answers, so this doesn’t seem too bad
You can always turn off emails instead of not voting on the polls.
@RiotDemon
nuclear option?
I was a bit miffed at this myself, if not just because it resulted in yet another (mostly) useless email in my inbox. I vote in the polls to see how my views line up with popular opinion, not because I may want to buy even more.
My meh click calendar shows my streak ended at 185 days in a row on the 7th.
I look at the 7th and see that I clicked Meh, and remember the poll.
Now I get directed marketing for participating in that poll, but no recognition for my meh click!
To make matters worse, also got same marketing for the 19th
When I run across obvious data mining “polls” (and other such) I tend to scribble outside the lines. On FarceBork rhey tend to be of the form “What’s your Danish Jungle Safari Outfitter’s Pet Crocodile Name” or rhe like, where they want you to encode your vital statistics via table selection that is trivially decoded. I give anawers which are not in the symbol set, like Cambridge Analytica Bondage Fetish Medical Appliances. I am no fun at all, it seems.
@werehatrack I don’t know about that. Depending on who you are, ‘Bondage Fetish Medical Appliances’ could sound like a fun time.
When I got my “we think you’ll like this demon shirt because you said ghosts are scary” e-mail, my first thought was NICE TRY, MEH, ON THE CORPORATE SYNERGY. And then my second thought was that there really isn’t that much in common between ghosts and demons, no more than any other answer on that particular poll. Which led to another NICE TRY, MEH. NOT GONNA FALL FOR IT, MEH, NOT TODAY. I mean, it was a nice try. But I’m moving soon, can’t load up on demonic t-shirts until afterwards. Probably won’t then, either.
I got the same email and they were right, I had already ordered one. This is the fifth email I’ve gotten recommending a shirt based on a poll answer- the first was Thor.
I think it’s pretty funny and don’t mind.
@sammydog01 Loki was the first one I got too and was annoyed for a split second, then thought it was funny, then bought the Loki and Thor shirts.
In don’t recall getting these but I probably turned them off or unsubscribed. I’m sure you can too.
As far as marketing goes… I’d say it’s more of a “we thought you might like this too”. Vs much creepier tracking. Those annoying “hey you left this behind” emails from places I didn’t even log all the way into. Or actual global targeted advertising.
But I agree it’s weird to get targeted advertising from a poll. I would not have ever expected to get advertising from any forum activity.
@unksol Home Depot does that to me all the time. I might be researching something and end up on their site and look at a couple products. Next thing I know, I’m getting emails asking me to take a second look at those items.
I’ve gone so far as to change my email address with HD to an anti-tracking @duck address. Changed it on my account plus the one linked to my credit card but somehow I still get the emails to my primary address. I wouldn’t mind that much but they nag me about the product daily for a long time.
I could unsubscribe but I don’t want to because I occasionally get emails with a sale on a popular item or a coupon code.
@cengland0 lol Home Depot is one of the big ones. But. I also let them email me receipts when in the store and apparently once you do that your card is tied to those emails for next time. And sometimes they send deals. And if you live near a Menards you get 11% rebates on everything when Menards is running that. I also dumped a bit with them on projects I need to do/been putting off to hit the spend on a credit card reward recently so. Meh.
The “did you forget this” when I was just making a list of price checking for later is minorly annoying but I’ve always maintained two separate emails. One for “generic/web” crap and one for actual real stuff.
@unksol I physically walked into the store, made a purchase and changed my address at the POS that is linked to my credit card for the purpose of emailing receipts to that @duck address. I still get emails at my primary address though. I do get some at the @duck address too so I know this change partially worked.
I like the email receipts. Makes it easier if you need to return something. I rarely refund anything and just keep extra supplies in case I need them later. But I do have rental property and need to keep track of my expenses so having a digital copy of my receipts without me having to scan them is a great bonus just for shopping at Home Depot.
@cengland0 @Duck @unksol Ebay is another one that hounds you for everything you look at too. They need to stop when I already bought the item from Ebay!
@cengland0 yeah. I almost never return things anywhere but need them for the rebates when they are running them. I think the only time I’ve returned things in years was last month when I tried to squeeze a run in after work that ran late and it’s a 20 minute drive and I *thought" I knew where everything was… Ran into closing time and grabbed some of the wrong bits lol
@callow @cengland0 hmmm I guess I have not logged into ebay for a very long time
@callow @cengland0
@cengland0 I mean I assume you wiped your cache/internet history after you changed it. To the duck
Fyi @ duck is an actual member. So you are @ ing them. Which may be confusing for them. Guessing they don’t like to chat since they have been around since 2014 but been a member since August 2021 so I assume active.
When hitting reply it automatically adds @ duck which I’ve been deleting on my responses.
@callow I hate it when a company markets me for the same item I already bought from them. Makes the company look stupid because they know I looked at it but they don’t know I bought it?!?!? Home Depot does that all the time.
Sams Club sends me daily emails with lists of things I bought previously asking me to buy them again. I would completely unsubscribe to those emails but I share a membership with a friend and I asked him to create a script to forward those emails to me and now I’m too embarrassed to have him reverse that work so I simply delete the emails. Sams Club also emails me receipts (my option to get them at the POS) but I don’t need those for expense tracking because food is not tax deductible for my kind of business.
One thing I’ve had happen on eBay is that I’ve put a couple items in my watch list and then I get emails spamming me about the auction is almost over. But then I sometimes get offers from the seller at a vastly reduced price than what was originally listed just because I watch listed the item. So I did appreciate the reduced price offers, I don’t want them telling me when an auction is expiring. Suppose you have to take the good with the bad and it doesn’t take much time to delete the emails you don’t want but it does annoy me.
@callow @cengland0 I mean. You can of course set some email filters to send things to trash. “From:ebay. subject contains:expiring send to: trash”
Or another folder if you want to look at them later just in case
@unksol Oops, sorry to the @ Duck person that I’ve been spamming. DuckDuckGo has a new feature that they will create a @ Duck address for you and then they will remove all the trackers from the emails it receives and then forward the new version of the email to your primary address. It works so well at times that I get completely blank emails with no content in it.
I did delete my cookies from that site today now that this problem surfaced to the top of my mind. But I don’t want to wipe my entire cache or history for other reasons. My guess is that once I logged into Home Depot, they logged my IP address and linked that to my account. So if anyone in the family from that same IP address browses an item on their site, they can still link it to me. That’s not a fool-proof way of identifying someone especially with a dynamic IP but they are somehow still tracking me without me logging in. I’ll see if the clearing of my site cookies is sufficient to get off their mailing list for viewed items.
@cengland0 I’d assume it was a cookie from a login but never tried to change my email or stop them
And I assumed @ duck was something with duck duck go
https://meh.com/@duck they probably don’t check their profile/have notifications on since this is the only thing in their feed
@cengland0 @Duck @unksol Those are the WORST. “You casually glanced at this one item, one time, for 10 seconds, so here are 3 emails a day for a week asking you to buy it!”
@cengland0 @Duck @PooltoyWolf
I only usually get them if it’s in my cart and it’s usually 1 or 2 . I guess someone could abuse or badly configure the same type of system. I’d just unsubscribe if they were that bad
@cengland0 @PooltoyWolf
Poor duck got dragged in again.
If you care about email tracking.
https://www.theverge.com/22288190/email-pixel-trackers-how-to-stop-images-automatic-download
The shit out government allows. But what do we expect when they are to old to operate a computer and are bogged down on bitching at each other
They’re probably using tracking pixels or web beacons that you can’t see. It’s a way to track without cookies. Sometimes AdBlock or UBlock can help stop it, but even that may not help. Look up browser fingerprinting. Mostly you just have to send the emails to trash.
@2many2no If you go to your profile you can see your vote in all the polls so I’m pretty sure they don’t need to do any sneaky tracking. If you’re talking about the initial post.
I think you are taking the wrong message from this. The correct response would be to reassess your preference for cats.
@macromeh why? Is there an upgrade?
Or are just upset about the cute cat shirts are not xxxx shirts?
@macromeh
/giphy anti-cat
@macromeh @unksol They’ll get you on some other preference:
https://meh.com/forum/topics/marketing-emails-off-of-polls#614ea7b9db55ce001bb09988