The Email Wars

I have been watching surveys in email lately as more and more brands are frequently using them. The fact that they are asking is great. How they are asking and the method of taking the surveys are another story.

Many of the things that I found to be issues are:
1. You must log into your account to take the survey. Lost me. Will lose most people
2. You must log into to your account to manage your email preferences. Now this is not unsubscribe, but why can’t you click from a link to do this? They have all the info to pass already.
3. There is no action to take on the thank you pages to get me to go somewhere or make me an offer for the time and information I just gave you.
4. The sender email address is not the brand. The from field is, but everything else is from a 3rd party.

All challenges to goal completion in my book.

Apple:

The creative is nice and clean. Expected from Apple. But the sender email address is from a 3rd party survey company ghosting the Apple name in the sender field. Red flag to me. You?

The Survey is nice and clean. Again points on the board. It shows me the progress to completion so that I know how much more I need to answer to complete. Win.

The thank you page has no link, call to action or reward. You had me at hello. I am a brand loyalist and you could get me to look at something that would be relevant to the survey or even offer me something special.

Fandango:
You make me log in to take a survey about if I liked the movie or not. Why? I wonder what the conversion rate is here? I would wager low. I am so bad with always remembering passwords for all my sites I was not going to take the time to remember. You had me at the click, so why would you place a road block here.

You also offer me a way to unsub from these post movie surveys (only on this movie though, look at the fine print) but you make me log in to change my email preferences. You have such an opportunity for progressive profiling here. You could be getting so much more movie preference stats on me for later targeting. I know you can run a sort in your DB, but I am here to give you my info to make my life easier and our dialogue better… don’t stop me from being able to tell you.

Expedia:
Login to tell you about my hotel stay? Pass me through with the link. Get my review and let me move on. I had a great stay at the Westin, so why don’t you make it easy to give you the feedback for your consumer generated content?

I also could not find a direct way to unsubscribe unless I logged in? Isn’t this going to be an issue with the new CanSpam rulings taking affect July 7th, 2008?

All of these were nicely designed emails, good copy, clear action buttons, but the landing pages of the surveys all lacked ways to make me feel 100% happy about them. Maybe I am a perfectionist around email marketing and methods, but guys it is not that hard. It is rather easy to do the right thing. Hopefully some of you will read this post so that we can all do better with customers, data capture and conversion.