Nine examples of funny and illiterate promotional letters

For work and as ordinary users, we constantly have to deal with illiterate mailings or just funny examples of spam.

We periodically publish such examples
on our Vkontakte and on Facebook , and have accumulated a small collection of such unsuccessful emails, some of which we would like to share with you - and at the same time talk again about typical mistakes in email marketing. Forgotten names, gender discrimination and geypad advertising - under the cut.

1. Autosubstitution Name
Compilation opens a letter from Sony Ericsson , in which the company has forgotten what their client’s name is. Classic error:



Personalization of letters is an excellent technique that helps to attract the attention of the recipient and increases customer loyalty. However, poorly personalized messages can quickly destroy so carefully built relationships, nullifying all your efforts. Therefore, even using automatic messaging, check that everything is configured correctly, and instead of “client”, “subscriber” the person saw his name.

2. Sexual discrimination.
As you know, letters can be personalized not only by name, but also by other parameters: gender, age, and behavioral factors. This is especially true for greeting emails.

On February 23, the QIP.ru portal, congratulating its customers on a men's holiday, forgot to target letters by gender. As a result, in addition to men, girls received congratulations:



And on March 8, on the contrary, not all of the female audience of QIP.ru waited for pleasant words for the holiday. Whether men received these letters for them, we do not know. So be careful with congratulatory letters in the future.

3. Unsubscribe can’t be received
Another typical mailing error is an illiterate or completely absent unsubscribe procedure.

We give you 2 examples: one is related to the unsubscribe link, and the second to the unsubscribe process itself.

Not so long ago, we received a letter from a reputable resource about the Internet business roem.ru , who forgot to provide the letter with a link to the unsubscribe. Given that this is, in fact, the basics of a competent mailing list, we can understand our impression - it is as if a gentleman left the house without his pants:



4. And this is how the unsubscribe from the Apple mailing list works:



Of course, Apple was famous not only for its excellent products, but also for its somewhat totalitarian approach to many issues. As it turned out, the policy “we know better what you need” also applies to company mailings: in the photo you see that despite the unsubscribing, the news will come for another 10 days. To frivolous addressee thought better of it, therefore.

5. Measure seven times.
Often, especially when time is running out, companies send their letters without checking them in advance. As a result, subscribers receive letters with broken links, with a strange set of characters instead of words, obscure images, and so on. In the last post, we just published a selection of services for previewing your letters. But what happens if you do not use them:

Dick's Sporting Goods sporting goods store was in such a hurry to inform its customers about the sale taking place on their network that they forgot to check the letter before sending it. As a result, no matter how hard the recipients tried, they could not find a single working link: neither to the site where additional information about the conditions and terms of the sale was posted, nor a picture link to the product catalog. To top it all, they still did not leave their contacts, and the list of stores was not provided to subscribers. In a word, Dick's Sporting Goods tried to do everything so that their customers could not get on sale:



6. And in this letter from eLama.ru there are obvious problems with the images:



But the problem is not even that (almost everyone has problems with pictures), but that in this case the pictures contain text, which is absolutely impossible to do.



Remember: if you offer text information, then give it in text format. Images are recommended for illustration purposes only.

7. Freudian reservation
In a hurry sometimes quite funny mistakes happen. For example, one of our customers shared a story about how his company once sent a million subscribers a letter with an interesting headline: "Sale of geypads." Surely these letters had amazing rates of open rate and CTR.

8. And one company included 24 thousand people in the list of general mailing lists.Many of them probably never reached the text of the letter, tired of scrolling through the mailing list.

9. Errors in the signature.
Here typical mistakes can be divided into 2 groups: incorrect design or too much / too little information.

A signature in the email is needed to inform the recipient of the letter about how he can contact you, as well as a little publicity of the necessary resources. But do not get too carried away and go into the smallest details, otherwise your signature may turn out to be even more than the message itself:



Thank you for your attention.

We wish our readers and clients to be more attentive and accurate. And also we remind you that we publish all the most interesting and useful materials on email marketing every day on our Facebook pagesand Vkontakte . Read us!