Will Marketers Never Learn?

If you have been reading Limeduck like I have, you might have read about a Rockport print ad showing shoes that are not available for purchase.  As I noted on that website, this has happened before.  In a Marketing class several years ago, my professor showed a television ad featuring a car that could not be purchased.  As you can imagine, consumers saw the car and went to their local dealerships looking for that car only to learn that it wasn’t available.  Given that high profile mistake, I am surprised that Rockport made the same gaffe.

And yet, just today I received an e-mail that I wanted to share.  In an earlier post, I talked about how some e-mail programs do not load images.  This was in the context of measuring the open rate of an e-mail.  However, the fact that some e-mail software turns images off by default also affects the look and feel of an e-mail.  Here’s what the e-mail looked like:

In the image above, pictures have been replaced by boxes featuring red squares, blue triangles and green circles.  All of the time spent crafting a beautifully designed e-mail is lost if recipients cannot quickly read about the offer(s) and easily engage with the e-mail. I certainly did not bother to display the images in this e-mail.

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