Play.com email communications arrive roughly twice a week, one just before the weekend, and one just after. I usually open them to see what special offers they are promoting at the time. The most recent one i received was entitled 'Dynamite Deals', advertising products from low prices. These come to me because i subscribed to their newsletter from a recent purchase.
There was no evident personalisation. It is common for emails to personalise the subject line, the content and promotions in the email by using dynamic fields pulling data on a specific customers habits from a database, such as Amazon do. The template is friendly to look at, although very image heavy, which can cause problems for a lot of people as the email is likely to be refused entry to the user's inbox, or filtered into the spam folder. It is best practice for emails to contain a rough 50/50 balance between text an images to optimise it for delivery.
There are two calls to action on the email, found in the images. 'Shop Now', and 'Pre-Order Now' can be found, although the buttons are small and fairly discrete, perhaps not giving the customer much of a reason to click though, although the general email gives off the impression of 'click anywhere to be directed to the complete list of products in the promotion'. The URLs go to a dedicated page for all the products available under 'Dynamite Deals', although there are no alt tags and the functionality of the email is fairly crude. For example the top has navigation to the various product categories, but it is a sole linked image so no matter what you click, you will always be taken to the same page.
I think the email has an attractive design, and gets the point of the promotion across well, however I think the CTA's are weak and the email is badly designed with lack of personalisation and balance of text content, some of the most fundamental properties of a good email campaign. Perhaps Play.com should go back to email marketing 101.
What gives me the right to critique an email from such a big company? Well, I worked for a FTSE company for a year on email marketing and CRM. I was responsible for executing email campaigns across several brands and used personalisation and tailored communications depending on the segment the email was designed for. We were widely regarded as having a good CRM department with communications being relevant, timely and personalised. They always performed to best practice and had some of the best open rates in the industry.
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