Andy Gambles

This email is a brilliant example of how not to do email marketing (all in my opinion of course). The main reason I thought I would share this is because it is from an "email marketing" consultant. I have no experience of Fiona Hudson-Kelly's services nor have I ever met her. But the other day she sent me an email containing an invite to a training seminar about Email Marketing.

• The email was sent to an email address only ever used on whois records (These are the details you supply with a registered domain). This means the address must have been harvested.
• The email starts "Dear Aguk". So who is that? My name is Andy and my company is AGUK Solutions Ltd.
• The email given for a contact is [email protected]. Using an ISP email address for responses? This could get blacklisted and looks a bit cheap.
• The email formatting is rubbish with excessive white space.

Below is an image of the email I received along with some of my comments. (The email is copyright Fiona Hudson-Kelly apparently)

If you were to ask me for my opinion of using Fiona Hudson-Kelly I would say, based on this evidence, don't.

I have just received this email marketing from Tesco. The email design is good and visually appealing however the implementation is poor.

Here are some of the things I think they should look to change.

How do you know me?
I always suggest including in your email information about how you obtained the recipients details. Recipients can forget who you are and even signing up in the first place. The email suggests I have signed up to use the Tesco online website. I do not remember doing that nor do I remember ever buying anything from it.

Inactive Subscribers
I would always advocate removing inactive subscribers from your mailing list. I may, in the very distant past, have used the Tesco website but it must have been many years ago.

Do you want me back?
It is easy to identify me as an inactive therefore this email would have been much better worded as a "we have not seen you at Tesco online for a while, why not come back and see our new features and what we have to offer". This could have been used as a re-activation campaign.

What email address? 
It says in the footer "You must sign in using this email address to see the improved website". Many individuals have multiple email addresses and in many cases these are forwarded to different accounts. This can mean the recipient does not actual know what email address it was sent to. 

No Unsubscribe Link
The golden rule of email marketing is always include an unsubscribe link. This email does not have one. This makes it far too easy for me to instead hit the "Report Spam" button.

Clicking the unsubscribe link in a recent email I received presented me with the above page. (click image to enlarge). Clearly the company in questions has not fully tested the unsubscribe process. 

PS I hope this email isnt thought of as spam, we would just like to the opportunity to quote you 

We apologise if you have received this email in error. To UNSUBSCRIBE from further emails regarding special offers etc, please reply to this message and ask to be removed from the mailing list. Many Thanks.  to complete this, we need a few bits of information. 1) where in the country you are 2) email address that it is being sent to 3) when you revived your last email from ourselves.