A confusing (auto-generated) email from Ko-fi

I’ve recently made a donation to an online artist via Ko-fi, which is a fundraising and content subscription service that is fairly popular within the artist community and known for its relatively low percentage rate (0-5%) of platform fees.

I don’t have a Ko-fi account, but fortunately, I am allowed to make the donation without having to create one. I can do that as a guest by entering my email address and payment method information.

After donating, I then received two emails from Ko-fi. One of them was the payment receipt, but the other one looked so peculiar to me that I was motivated to write this article.

Before I clicked into the email, its preview displayed a line of text that contained an inconsistent combination of promotional (marketing email sounding) and cautionary (security email sounding) tones.

When I opened the email to read its body text, I then found myself looking at a series of statements, with some of them seemingly contradicting each other (tone-wise, or in one example, literally), at least that’s what I think.

Besides a puzzling mix of marketing-email-like (‘you’re missing out’, ‘it’s not loo late’, etc.) and security-email-like (‘Confirm your guest tip’, ‘Click here to confirm it was you’) phrases, I think it’s a bit sinister that the more urgent-sounding security-email-styled phrases are featured the most prominently in the email body, with ‘Confirm your guest tip’ being the heading, and the ‘ominous’ ‘Click here to confirm it was you’ button being the hardest-to-ignore element inside the email.

The lack of an unsubscribe button is also really weird, because this is usually a feature of security emails that tells the recipient that they should (reasonably) pay more attention to the email, but this particular email is basically marketing in nature: it’s trying to promote a feature offered by the platform with almost no stakes involved on the end user’s side, as illustrated by the screenshot below, which shows the webpage that launches after clicking that big black button in that email.

Unless… it’s trying to trick users into thinking that it’s a security email that deserves immediate attention, which is categorically not what’s actually happening here (or it’s simply one of those kinds of irritating marketing emails that cannot be easily opted out).

In my opinion, as a crowdfunding platform, Ko-fi’s business practice is already more consumer- and creator-friendly compared to its competitors, especially considering their low platform fee rates.

Still, I’d appreciate it if they were more direct, honest and transparent in communicating their intent of persuading people to sign up for an account in their platform, instead of employing trick wording in what looks like an attempt to disguise essentially a marketing message so that it resembles a security warning, thereby attracting an unwarranted amount of urgency.

Also, I’m pretty sure that when people make donations without an account, in most cases they’re consciously making this decision, i.e. they actively choose not to sign into or create an account. Thus, receiving an email afterwards that basically ‘reminds’ them to do the exact opposite of their preference, without even having the option to unsubscribe from it, is really annoying.

Alas, I expected better from you, Ko-fi.