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I received the following message from a web site I signed up with probably six months ago:
From: [email protected]
Sent: December 11, 1999 12:18 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: What’s in it for you this holiday season…Give a gift from ingredients.com IN the Saint Nick of time.
Our scent-sational line of personal care products can lift your spirits, calm your soul, or take you wherever you want to go. And you won’t even have to use our products for them to work their magic on you. Just do your holiday shopping at ingredients.com. The sheer simplicity will give you peace of mind and the free gift-wrapping and shipping will give your body a break. Find out what’s in it for you and all your friends.
ingredients.com. Your personal care e-source for peace of mind, body and holiday spirit.
This is the first time they’ve mailed anything to me. I took a look at this and thought that they had largely wasted a great opportunity to reach me during the pre-Xmas frenzy.
I’d like to propose that we try and “fix” this message to make it an effective marketing tool. I’d like to hear your thoughts on what works and doesn’t work, what should have been included, and what should have been omitted.
I’ll start off with three easy improvements:
1. They didn’t put a link to their site! I can guess from the company name that I need to go to ingredients.com, but they most certainly should have given me a hot link.
2. They didn’t remind me that I ASKED to be on this list. When I first looked at it I thought I was being spammed.
3. They don’t follow basic privacy guidelines by giving me a simple way to get off the list with each mailing.
I can think of about 10 more things they could have done to make this better, but before I ramble on, I’d like to see what everyone else comes up with. Let the games begin!