Proofread Your Marketing Materials, Or Else

Wednesday, 1 July 2009

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 27 seconds

I had to title this with something obnoxious, you’ll see why.

The value of checking your work

After all, any company that sends out a targeted direct marketing email to (quite possibly) tens of thousands of people should at least be double-checking their spelling, right? And Dunn Bros. did just that in their latest “Tell us your opinion, get half-off any beverage” email.

But they didn’t check their links. In the words of one of my personal childhood heroes: Ruh roh.

Dunn Bros.’ email

Above you see a screenshot (click to enlarge) of the email sent to my mother, who was kind enough to forward it to me (she’s a retired marketer).

There are four links that don’t act as expected. And one is a huge mistake.

1. GIFT CARDS: Takes you to a shopping cart page instead of the actual Gift Cards page, even though there’s a link to the Gift Cards page from the Shopping Cart page.
2. START SURVEY: This is the most embarassing of all. The entire point of this email is to generate feedback by enticing users to take a survey. Except that when you click the button, it takes you to the SurveyMonkey home page.
3. Dunn Bros on Facebook: Directs you to a dead page.
4. Privacy Policy: Direct you to Emma’s privacy policy, rather than the expected Dunn Bros. online privacy policy. Making matters worse, most users probably wouldn’t know what Emma’s is (HINT: it’s the email marketer Dunn Bros. uses).

There are 16 links in this email. That’s a 25% failure rate.

Strangely enough, if you click the first link to see the email online instead then all of these links work just fine.

(NOTE: Sorry, I would include that link, except the page includes a direct link to my mom’s profile via the “Your Online Profile” link on the bottom. And I thought this couldn’t get any worse!)

Never assume anything

So what went wrong? Whoever created this email probably tested the webpage version (as they probably created it using a web service anyway, so it seems only natural) and assumed that the email links would work the same.

Proofreading is still valuable

This is embarrassing for Dunn Bros, because it is compounded by the simplicity of its prevention. All one person had to do was test the email on a few different email providers, and make sure all the links worked. This is a great example of how doing digital marketing wrong can actually hurt your brand. By wasting users’ time and, even worse, unknowingly bait-and-switching them (as no one can get their promised coupon now), Dunn Bros. forced people away from their brand.

Test, test, test

Never accept anything less than a 100% success rate (not just follow-through) on your digital marketing efforts – specifically emails, because they are static and not dynamic like webpages. Just follow the mantra, “Test, test, test.” There will never be an inappropriate time to prooFRead, spel-chek, and link-test your marketing.