• by Chad White , September 6, 2007

With the holiday email season already underway, I thought I'd put on my consumer hat and share my list of the most frustrating, consumer-unfriendly aspects of retailers' email programs -- in ascending order of importance -- in the hope that some will fix them before the season heats up further:

5. Long delays in fulfilling subscriptions. As I revealed in a recent column, nearly one-third of major retailers don't deliver their first regular email within two weeks of the subscription date. Long delays in newsletter fulfillment squander consumer enthusiasm -- and during the holiday season this costs you prime selling opportunities. Subscriptions should be honored within two weeks, just like unsubscribes -- if not sooner.

4. Missed emails. Most retailers have a fairly consistent cadence to their email programs. For instance, REI and Northern Tool send emails every Friday. So subscribers come to expect those emails. But I've experienced several occasions where I stopped receiving emails from a particular retailer for a stretch and then started receiving them again. For example, during June/July, there was a period of more than a month where I didn't receive any emails from Diamond.com, whereas the company normally sends one email a week. Presumably, these retailers are being filtered. Retailers should be on top of their deliverability and not take a month to fix problems. Uundelivered emails during the holiday season can mean significant dollars left on the table.

3. Delayed deliveries. I've experienced recurring delayed email deliveries with Overstock.com, eBags and TigerDirect in particular, but have also had problems with Costco and recently Lands' End. It's pretty frustrating to get emails with "today only" specials that have expired through no fault of the recipient, but because of delivery delays. During the holiday email season there will be even more limited time offers, some of them associated with retailers' "12 Days of Christmas" campaigns, so avoiding quarantines and other delays that hurt the relevance of your messages should be a priority.

2. Failed sign-ups. Obviously much worse than simply the delayed fulfillment of a subscription, failed subscriptions can squander the goodwill that consumers had when they decided to sign up for your email program. I've personally had problems with a handful of retailers -- including Amazon.com, Lowe's and QVC -- whose newsletters I've never been able to successfully subscribe to. How many times will an average consumer put up with failed sign-ups before they decide that you're not worth the trouble? You should make sure that your subscription process works, whether the customer is signing up via your homepage or opting in during checkout.

1. Poor landing pages. This would be my biggest gripe about email marketing programs. You get an email, you see a great product, you click through, and you get a "Page Not Found" error. On the upside, at least that's a quick disappointment. Even worse, I think, is when you click on a product in an email and the landing page includes a lot of other products. Then you get to carefully scroll through looking for that product that you were really interested in. I clicked through an Old Navy email recently and went through several pages of shirts looking for the one that had caused me to click through. I never saw it, got frustrated and left. Landing page optimization is something every retailer should be paying attention to, especially with Christmas just around the corner.