One E-mail’s Tragic Odessey

The people who bring you the latest St. Louis Honda e-mail show you how badly you can do an e-mail.  I found it in my junk mail, for starters.

For seconds, they put the alt/title attribute for the header image to “Please enable graphics”:

I don't think that will do what you want it to do
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I get what they’re trying to do.  If you have images disabled, that text would display telling you to enable image display.  Which is all well and good, but:

  • The e-mail client is already prominently asking if you want to see the images, including a link or button to display them.
  • My e-mail clients block out the alt text, too, so I wouldn’t see that when the images didn’t display.
  • The text will make no sense to a person listening to a screen reader.

Even worse:

That's from the Greek, you know. Almost.
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That’s right: They have misspelled one of the model names.  If only they had named the model Trek.

And if you click through the Odessey link, it takes you through to:

Remember, to your development staff, & and & are the same in a URL
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Ah, yes, the old encoded ampersand in the URL trick.  Remember, your more technically-savvy developer and designer friends can and often will spend hours arguing with you in e-mail and in person that the ampersand and the ampersand followed by amp and a semicolon are the same thing in HTML.

I don’t know if UnityWorks! Media did this to St. Louis Honda or if it was some poor shmuck at St. Louis Honda who did this through a user-based system.  However, someone should have probably looked at it first.  Someone who at the very least knew the model names.

DADDY’S COMING HOME UPDATE: Welcome, St. Louis Honda readers!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009 at 5:07 am by The Director and is filed under Failed e-mails. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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