Schoolboy Errors in Email

text goes ... er...

The more observant amongst Sandlines’ readership may have noticed that I’ve mentioned a band from Glasgow, called Glasvegas, a couple of times. You may not be amazed to learn, then, that I signed up for their email communications.

I think there must be something about music companies and their approach to email that just misses the point: this email is from Sony subsidiary, Columbia Records, but shows many of the same problems I saw a few years back from one of the other majors (who’ll remain nameless… for now).

In common with a lot of emails from this industry, there is a lot of reliance on images to convey the message of the email. This is fine until you realise that the default for so many email accounts to keep images turned off by default.

Never mind, I turned images on - after all, I want to see what they have to say.

Oh.

They’ve done the old black-text-on-a-black-background trick. I suspect they planned to do white text on black, but of course testing the outcome in the various email clients is just such a lot of work…

As Nate Elliott from JupiterResearch (before being swallowed by Forrester) said at my Advanced Email Strategies conference last year, “… (email marketers)… are Marketers without Images”. Seems Columbia went one better - marketers without images OR words.

Tags: email, glasvegas, images, music