One of my former colleagues, now Head of Internet (South Africa), for Investec Asset Management, recently highlighted on his blog an excellent example of poor customer communication via email. I was therefore intrigued to receive within a few days of his post another example of an extremely poorly crafted email, also from South Africa – but this time from Old Mutual, a company that, in my opinion, really should know better. There are so many problems with the email I’m not even sure where to start:
- There is no attempt at branding – although a header graphic file was included this has not been configured to display correctly
- The email has been regarded as junk mail – they are lucky I noticed it at all
- The body copy is the worst I have ever seen. I’m not even sure why they bothered to send the email. It gives no indication what the new ‘article’ is about and most bizarrely of all no link to the document in question! The only thing I could think is that they have not included a link to avoid appearing as a ‘phishing’ email – but then there is a link to the Old Mutual legal notice – not the most dynamic of landing pages to direct traffic trying to get to your site.
The list could go on and on but I think you get the idea.
A 'typical' Old Mutual Email
If you want an idea what Old Mutual should have in fact done, take a look at the following post for hints and tips.
To me this is the perfect example of what I call the ’skin flint’ approach to email marketing. Clearly, someone at Old Mutual thought this might be a ‘cheap’ way of getting their message out into the market. They did not consider that while it could be the most effective way of getting their message out – it should never be done cheaply.
Email marketing like any other discipline requires investment to be done well. Just because it can be done cheaply, does not necessarily mean it will be done well. Old Mutual, please pay attention!!
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