Kohl’s is running another sweepstakes, and this one includes an object lesson about testing ancillary elements of your promotions.
The problem doesn’t lie with the form itself; you fill it out, and on the thank you for entering page it allows you to send a friend a link to the sweepstakes. That’s becoming pretty standard fare, and I didn’t get an error with the tell-a-friend form.
However.
A Men’s Wearhouse e-mail apparently indicates this image is important by giving the image an asterisk as its alt text:
As a reminder, if you don’t want to include alt text with an image, the proper and Section 508 compliant way to do so is with an empty alt attribute, not with random characters in it.
Sometimes, even well-intentioned designers and developers errantly use the old cut-and-paste trick to replicate existing things, such as table rows in layouts such as we see in this e-mail:
Sadly, though, even well-intentioned designers and developers are only designers and developers. In this case, no doubt the person cloned the first row in the table and used it as a microtemplate for all others in the table. Unfortunately, that person forgot to change the alt text for the Gifts image.
That’s why you have to test every thing, every time, QAsmonauts. Because this time it’s the alt text, but next time it could be the image filename (resulting in the wrong image or a broken image) or it could be the target of the link.
You have to hand it to the people responsible for the Disney Movie Rewards e-mails. They just try harder.
The basic e-mail has the normal, if you can’t see it, click to see it on the Web link:
And that view as Web page is wise enough to remove the View as Web page link (a pet peeve of mine, as you know: the “View as Web page” link on the actual Web page that the user views when viewing an e-mail as a Web page). The Disney interactive marketing team and its e-mail vendor go the extra mile, though, and put a special link on that Web page instead:
Awesome. I love it when they go that extra step. And fail:
A page entitled Marketer Error Page with nothing on it.
It could not be named more appropriately.
You know what The Director does when he’s running through the test e-mails, sometimes called “friendlies” because they’re sent to a list of known people for testing? He clicks every link in the e-mail. And you know what he does when he clicks the View as Web page link? He clicks every link on the Web page.
Often you’ll find that tracking information is missing or whatnot, but every once in again, you get the good stuff.
I should make a special category called Disney to collect all the pro bono work I’m doing for the company.
This confirmation e-mail rendered in text has one thing going for it: The composers knew that the trademark and the registered trademark symbols don’t render correctly, so they replaced those symbols with ™ and (r) respectively.
Too bad nobody thought about the smart apostrophe in Tony’s(r).
Remember, if you’re using Microsoft Word or other popular programs, the applications will replace straight quotes in the copy with smart quotes, and most people are not smart enough to know the difference. You, fellow QAer, must.
Dear e-mail campaign designer, please remember that smart quotation marks and smart apostrophes (as well as other special characters like em dashes) do not render properly in text only e-mails.
Ergo, say you’re putting together a tell-a-friend e-mail such as the one found on the Lost Sawyer’s Nickname Generator. You should probably take a little more care when copying the text from your word processor to make sure that you replace the apostrophe:
You could also do a little testing on it, too, but that’s probably too much to ask.
If they tried to look professional up in the dictionary the way they spelled it in the alt text, GMC wouldn’t find it:
You can guess what professional grade I give them for sloppy quality.
I get e-mails because I once signed up for KCStar.com so I could read an article there. I might have opted out once or twice before; I know I’ve tried to opt-out of the Twin Cities Star several times, but like a drunk-dialing ex, they keep ringing me up with ludicrous offers hundreds of miles from me.
So I tried to opt out of the e-mails via the latest offer from KCStar.com, an offer targeted to KU and MU (that’s University of Missouri-Columbia, not really an MU like my alma mater). Here’s the link in the e-mail:
If I were an e-mail marketer, I would almost be insulted:
I realize I single out BizJournals.com a lot, but geez, the quality of its e-mails and its Web site are atrocious and worthy of scorn.
This is Web 2.0 at its finest:
Oh, we have, have we?
Somehow, I suspect if you had encountered the error, I would not have encountered the error. Or at least I would hope so.
It’s Web 2.0, though, because we encountered the error together, and I am invited to freely contribute to the community by submitting a bug report.
It must be difficult running weekly e-mails and all, but someone should probably review the friendlies to make sure that your variable names aren’t coming through instead of, oh, I don’t know, values:
