Today’s email comes from the folks over at Best Buy. Based on how the email was presented, it appears that this is a subsection of their normal list, as the email came from “Best Buy Top Deals” instead of from “Best Buy”. Let’s go through it:
Subject Line and Visible Text
Best Buy leads their email with the following subject line and visible text:
Subject Line: OMG. It’s an email from Best Buy! These DEALS are top of the charts –
Visible Text: Plus, check out today Deal of the Day
Both are honestly a bit of a mess. First, spending the front half of our subject line getting excited about your own brand’s email is not a great idea. Best Buy sends emails all the time, so I wouldn’t say that an email from Best Buy is an “OMG” moment by any stretch. I’m also not a huge fan of using all caps in a subject line. It is a known spam flag.
In terms of the visible text, all I can say is that proper grammar matters. Grammar failures in the subject line and/or visible text can raise serious trust issues. In addition, when you combine the grammar mistake, all caps, and the fact that they sent the email as “Best Buy Top Deals”, the email looks extremely fishy. It reads more like a shady affiliate email than one sent from corporate (and by all accounts, this did come from Best Buy and not an affiliate).
Email Body
The body of the email looks fine, but ultimately it fails to deliver on the promise from the subject line. Everything about the lead in to this email screams that there will be huge deals in the email. Instead, we’re treated to the same basic email body that we always see in Best Buy emails. There’s a prompt to click on an image to see the big deals, but there aren’t any specific offers to speak of. In addition, the landing page from the main email offer doesn’t offer anything that looks like a “top deal”. The ones I saw were mostly along the lines of 20% off select televisions.
It should also be noted that the email was too large for Gmail to handle, so the bottom of the email was clipped. The issue with this has to do with the fact that all of the fine print and subscription management links were pruned. This is highly problematic from a trust perspective, as all of the required CAN-SPAM copy is not visible unless you click a link to show the entire email in a separate browser window.
Ultimately, this is a rare miss from a company that typically does solid work with their email promotions.