I’m a fan of MAD MEN drama and even find the advertising campaign references interesting, but when I saw this post in my Facebook wall I thought I would follow along and see how well AMC did in the email optin process.
Here’s the post that caught my attention.
On the plus side, they are using an incentive to motivate me to sign up for the newsletter. On the negative side as a male reader the nail polish kit isn’t really a strong draw.
What would happen if people put more effort into telling me the benefits of signing up. In this case; “get sneak peeks, show updates and more.”
So I clicked the link and was taken to this landing page.
Not a bad landing page. They show a copy of a previous newsletter that might be appealing. They also offer me a chance to sign up for other shows that I might like so there is a list building intent going on at AMC.
They also gather a bit of demographic info by asking me how I watch AMC. They might use that in targeting future mailings or they might just be collecting data.
Interesting note: they didn’t say I’d be receiving anything other than the Newsletter. Wonder if I’ll be getting promotional emails.
And as always, let’s use a more effective button than ‘Submit’. Try “Sign Me Up Now!”
Next step the ‘Thank You Page. This is the page you land on right after you hit the ‘Submit’ button.
This one is a bit of a puzzler for me. Sure they sent me to an amctv.com page on their website but this page looks like a home page to me.
I much prefer a more personal thank you page which states two basic things that are on most people’s minds when they sign up for something. 1) Did I do it right? Yes, your newsletter signup was successful. 2) What happens next. Check your inbox.
Here’s what was in my inbox.
Kinda sorta not very interesting. (They don’t even know which newsletter I signed up for) But the good news is, they did send a confirmation email.
Because I’m a stickler for detail I thought I’d click on their Privacy and Terms of Use link to see if they tried to sneak a permission statement in that says I will receive other mailings from them or ‘partners’ and guess what I see?
WHAT? (insert Don Draper voice here)
Here’s one simple lesson. Do a test message and LINK CHECK on every message you send. Autoresponders, email blasts, everything.
Finally…
…It’s now Friday, July 13 and I’ve received no other messages from AMC nor a first Newsletter. In today’s busy world, there’s a good chance I might even forget signing up in the first place.
If I were AMC, I’d send a few quick messages right after this one (say over 10 days) and remind me about the great and wonderous things AMC does and that they value me as a MAD MEN subscriber…
…and, oh yeah, did I win the Nail Polish Kit offered in the first post above.
Overall, this is just sloppy.
The funny part of this is every now and then a client will reference the ‘best practices’ of a blue chip company (like AMC) when they want me to do some ill advised email practice. “But AMC does it.”
They might, but we don’t do sloppy!