When someone needs to check their copy…

• Date – 7th April 2020
• Brand – SportPesa UK

An explanation

Normally I wouldn’t be too judgemental about fellow CRMers, and errors happen (we’ve all got URL links wrong in the past), but this is the second time I’ve seen the same basic grammatical error from this Sportsbook in their email snippet and it annoys me. As does the fact that they do my pet peeve and don’t offer a “View in browser” option.

So I’m going to call out SportPesa on this occasion as following a week of sportsbook downtime, they most certainly had the time to fix these!

• Subject Line – We’re back!
• Snippet – Impportant information regrading your SportPesa account
• From – SportPesa UK <email@sportpesapromo.com>

When you should test on Android…

• Date – 8th February 2019
• Brand – Bgo

An explanation

Bgo love a full image email. One with minimal text and one which supposedly looks good on mobile.

So there’s an irony that as a brand, they never fully test these things.

A case in point is their latest “Bgo Big One” email which once again renders incorrectly.

The annoyance is that this should be a relatively easy fix. Whilst I’m not an HTML expert, I’m confident that changing the dimensions of the image from a fixed dimension to a percentage based one should have the desired effect.

This assumes they’ve properly tested the email though, and recent history suggests otherwise…

Desktop

Mobile (Android – Huawei)

When the subject matter sells itself…

• Date – 25th January 2019
• Brand – Glastonbury

An explanation

When you find yourself bombarded by emails, sometimes it is easy to miss good/bad emails. It strikes me as amusing then when you receive an enticing email with such a strong selling point, but which really doesn’t deserve the time it receives.

The case in point here is this email selling the chance to perform at the Glastonbury Festival.

Glastonbury sells itself. It is arguably the most famous music festival in the world. It dominates BBC coverage for 5 days a year. It attracts musicians, celebrities and the public alike. It can make careers. It can resurrect careers. It can (occasionally) destroy them. The opportunity to perform is one no musician wants to miss.

As such, it feels like such a shame that See Tickets send out such dark, gloomy, long-winded emails. Dark backgrounds are bad for the eyes, difficult to read and look horrendous on mobiles. Add 5 paragraphs of long winded white text and you have an email which is a challenge to read.

Yet despite these flaws, this email will get some great KPI stats just because of what it offers. Just think what could be achieved if a decent designer and a more succinct copy-writer were able to build this. Such a shame, but ultimately the subject does indeed sells itself.

• Subject Line – Your chance to perform at Glastonbury 2019!
• From – Glastonbury Festival <glastonburyfestival@email.seetickets.com>

A Broken Template…

• Date – 18th December 2018
• Brand – MarathonBet

An explanation

It’s easy to praise emails, but sometimes it is also important to highlight when one could be done better. If there’s something which didn’t work, or there’s a silly error, or if it just looks horrible.

Ultimately, nobody is perfect. If you’ve worked in CRM, you’ve made mistakes. It’s easy to do. An error in personalisation, a bit of broken code, it happens to us all.

However the key is to catch the errors and to fix them.

The below email from MarathonBet is the latest one of many to use a template with what appears to be a broken header. Either that or the Designers have created a responsive template which deliberately has a full page header across it. Either way, it just looks wrong.

• Subject Line – *Name*, you could win Hibernian prizes and Free Bets this Christmas
• From – Marathonbet <noreply@email.marathonbet.co.uk>