Morrisons & email marketing - how to annoy recipients

Posted on February 7, 2008
Filed Under Work, Internet, Websites, Design, Email, Standards | |

I have had some badly rendered emails appear in my inbox in the past. Regardless of the email client; Outlook, Thunderbird, Hotmail, Gmail and more. Companies like Campaign Monitor & the Email Standards Project should be utterly applauded for their efforts to try and standardise emails in a similar way to web browsers.

However, nothing, and I mean nothing can excuse mistakes like this. Morrisons are a huge UK supermarket and have a 7-figure online budget. They use multiple online agencies to manage their web presence. Presumably (and a little through experience on this one) Morrisons use an agency to send their email marketing. OK so it is wishful thinking for me to imagine they would test in every email client and ensure a readable mail for all the big ones, but you would hope that the email contained something legible.

A few bits of text?

A link to the online version?

Please?

Check out what I got:

morrisons broken email 1

morrisons broken email 2

Pretty nuts right? How many people got the email like this? Everyone? Just Gmail? Should Morrisons have sent a follow-up? Do they even know?

Email marketing software is very sophisticated in 2008 and there is no excuse for any company to do this. Unsubscribe now methinks.

If you are really brave, check out just how long this scrawbled code jumble email actually was (and this was clipped by Gmail!):

The crazy Morrisons broken email full size (image)

Comments

5 Responses to “Morrisons & email marketing - how to annoy recipients”

  1. Richard Jones on February 7th, 2008 1:29 pm

    Oh dear. Was that produced by the sweet-sounding agency? Or did they outsource it?

  2. Ian on February 7th, 2008 1:48 pm

    I remember it being external, but there was talk of it coming in-house. Hard to tell. Either way its amazing..

    Did you see the large version? How can there even be that much code in an email?!

  3. Richard Jones on February 7th, 2008 10:26 pm

    Got bored of it loading. It’s huge. It’s both funny and sad.

  4. Foobar on March 3rd, 2008 1:55 pm

    Was this the same in desktop clients?!

  5. Ian on March 3rd, 2008 1:56 pm

    No it was unique to Gmail. Thunderbird didnt display anything at all!

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