Sports Authority may have all that you need when it comes to sports equipment. They even have a decent website and experience, but boy oh boy they need help with welcoming you in their email program. While I received my email as soon as I sign up on their site, you see below from the images that it needs some serious help.
Here is the welcome email:
Here are my observations on this welcome email
1. First they sent it as a plain text email.
2. They have a standard line of “if you cannot see the links or images in this email click the link below:” only the link takes you to a web page and shows you the same plain text email with no images or working links (image is below). Weird
3. The email says “Welcome to our mailing list!” Yo will now have the latest local circular deals delivered directly to your email inbox. Then it is says to not reply to this email as they are not able to respond to emails to this address. Huh? What sort of relationship are you trying to build here?
4. They then go on to say in the next bullet about unsubscribing….to click there. Wait..I just subscribed..why would I want to unsubscribe and why would I want to make it so prominent?
5. I am given a web link to view online help and a address to write to, in case I want to write to them which is completely counter-intuitive. Then, the plain text email ends with what appears to me a coding issue or message garble of
[[BZL4LE-ZDK-ZB2C-UGHRTC-V11CJ-T-M2-20081206-20b5827945c4e77b09]]
All in all this isn’t a welcome email, its a form letter and a bad form letter at that. Sports Authority you have such an opportunity to reach out and start a relationship with me, why not capitalize on it. Your form letter is cold, is not formatted and gives me nothing to go on to tell me about you guys.
Sigh…maybe you will see this post and want to change. One can only hope.
Web page look of the welcome email if I can’t see any of the images or links in my first email….only it looks no better than the email I got.
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Posted in bad email, copywriting, Deliverability, email acquisition, email content, email deliverability, email marketing, Email Rendering, email service providers, email strategy, relevancy, Transactional Email, Trigger based email, welcome email Tagged: bad email, copywriting, email, email content, email copywriting, email marketing, email strategy, emails, HTML email, plain text email, privacy, sports authority, sportsauthority.com.welcome email, Transactional Email, triggered email, website welcome, welcome strategy
