Should the app send emails, or should we let people turn them all off?
Every notification I send is a tiny bet: useful enough to justify the interruption, or annoying enough to train someone to ignore me forever.
I've got the essentials — password resets, receipts, security alerts — and those obviously stay. The fight is about everything else: weekly digests, "your teammate commented," "you haven't logged in in a while," product tips, feature announcements, re-engagement nudges.
Each one, on its own, is defensible. Together they're a firehose, and I know because I've unsubscribed from every product that did this to me.
The counterargument is that people forget the product exists, and silence is how you lose them quietly. Some of my best retention comes from a well-timed nudge. But some of my worst unsubscribes come from the same nudge sent to the wrong person at the wrong moment.
I've tried granular preferences, but nobody visits the settings page to fine-tune them — they just hit "unsubscribe from all" and I lose the good emails along with the bad.
How do you decide what earns a send? And do you default everything on and let people opt out, or default off and let them opt in?
Replies
Foe everything else I would judge it by whether the email helps someone do something they already care about.
I stopped deciding per email and gave all reminders one shared budget instead: at most one a week per account, whatever type it is. The digest, the "you have words due", the "your credits are still there" all compete for the same slot. That killed the firehose without me having to rank them by hand
Put the choice in the email itself
Mute this thread or switch to a weekly digest without digging through settings
And skip the email if the person already read the comment in the app
I see! I tend to separate the non-negotiable receipts from the nudges, then let people turn the rest down without digging through settings. The annoying bit is when teams keep adding "just one more" email 😅