QA Hates You

You know, gentle reader, that I like to click the View as Web page link that I see in e-mail campaigns to see how they bollix it up.

You know, by including the link to see the Web page representing an e-mail as a Web page or including unsubscribe links when the static Web page that all viewers who click through see. Or to fail catastrophically like the guys at The Web Corner do with their Ace Hardware e-mails.

Here’s my e-mail as displayed as a Web page:

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Huh, it’s got my e-mail address in it, and I don’t see my e-mail address in the querystring. What I do see is a couple of numbers. And if I change one of those numbers….

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Hey, that ain’t me.

Okay, guys, what lessons have we been shown today that they will not learn this time, either?

• Maybe you should check to see if someone has rights to see something if they alter the querystring by changing an obvious parameter.
• Test your view as Web page option in your e-mails to see if maybe you’ve messed it up.

Reader Dave H. sends in this sample e-mail:

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Click that free reward button, and you get a reward all right. If you’re a tester, you want no bigger reward than a stack trace:

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As I mention ad nauseum (disclosure: Pepto Bismol pays me to do things ad nauseum), when you’re doing an e-mail campaign or working with an application that triggers the e-mails, you always need to send the e-mail to yourself to test it. Click the dagnabbitic links, dagnabbit.

In the interactive world, they call the test e-mail sent through the bulk e-mails the friendlies, which is exactly what I would call a horror film about QA: “The Friendlies”. At least that’s what they called them where I worked. Apparently, the agency behind this campaign never heard of them. Or they’ve seen the script for my film and think that sending out friendlies is akin to saying “Candyman” the third time.

Regardless. Test your e-mails. Click the links. Period.

Josh at Mediababy LLC makes a mistake:

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Well, Josh, since you went through all the trouble to send me your beta e-mail, here are a couple things:

• Your View as Web page offering needs work; the heading is not centered, etc.
• Capitalization of your alt text should match the images or captions.
• Your boilerplate footer has hard line breaks and does not stretch the width of the e-mail body.
• A box surrounds supporter image in Firefox, but not IE (applies to Web mail only, but might impact Thunderbird vs. Office).
• I did not sign up with Media Baby. You bought my e-mail from a list. Don’t lie to me.

Better luck with the next iteration, but if you want me to recheck or to review your future efforts, please contact me professionally (info available on the Sez Who? page) instead of sending your friendlies out to the list you purchased.

A new e-mail from Wisk® includes something that every single e-mail from Wisk® includes: the stock footer.

However, this one does it badly:

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The whole e-mail renders poorly when viewed through Hotmail, so I cannot tell if it’s a failure related to that or if someone forgot to copy part of the boilerplate before pasting into the new message. I can tell you, though, it ain’t right.

The following e-mail provocatively asked me in the subject line What’s in your forcast?

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I have to say: it was an effective subject line since it caused me to open the mail and to load the images to make sure they spelled it right in the e-mail, which they did.

You can test the e-mails’ HTML all you want, but you really need someone with an eye for quality to look at the friendlies, too. (The friendlies, for those of you not in the e-mail campaign world, are test e-mails sent through the bulk e-mail sender to a small list of internal people for final approval.)

Jack in the Box’s latest e-mail offers the normal View as Web Page version:

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Note that The in the salutation is my first name, since I am The Director.

On the Web it checks out:

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The Web version changes omits it, since it’s not passing the first name to the Web version, although it could.

The Mobile version?

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Suddenly, it reads like a comment thread on Fark or something. Hey, FIRST!

You know, it’d laudable to make a separate version for different platforms. As long as you test it.

I feel qualified to ask what the designer was thinking when he put a text box with the words “1 message” in the middle of a table of images in the December Lexus e-mail:

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You know, in QA, you’re not hep to the latest gimcrackery that the designers smoke, and although they would look over their thin glasses at you if you dare, you have every right and qualification to say, “What the Niflhelm are you doing?”

Because users and consumers, even those who might consider a Lexus, are untouched by the design gods and are not capable of interpreting genius that’s demonstrated in the inscrutable or the insane.

A Welcome e-mail to the restaurant San Francisco Oven’s e-mail list is chock full of quotation marks and punctuation errors.  For flavor!

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Let’s see, we have:

• Extraneous “use” of quotation marks.
• Periods outside of quotation marks in the British style.  I doubt this was a stylistic decision.  I bet it’s using the American style wrong.
• Inconsistent use of periods (or lack thereof) in the first paragraph.
• In addition to “extraneous” use of quotation marks, we have a stray quotation mark.

Speaking forensically, what was missing from the process responsible for this?

• A professional copywriter.
• A proofreader.
• Review by anyone who uses English as a native language as opposed to whatever argot the damn kids speak or text these days.

As you know, I have a particular problem with the infinity that occurs when e-mails provide a Web version of the e-mail with a link to a Web version of the e-mail.

Fox eliminates that problem in this e-mail in a creative fashion:

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There’s the link in the e-mail.  Does it appear in the Web version?

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Hey, the View it in your Web browser link is gone.  Good work, Fox Broadcasting.

You know how you catch this sort of thing?  You promote the e-mail version to the Web before the friendlies go out.  Since your friendlies only lead the actual e-mails by a couple of hours (unless you work at Utopia, where you have until tomorrow as well as no personality conflicts at all nor problems to correct), you can get away with some links to content that hasn’t been promoted yet (if the e-mail touts an upcoming program).

That way, when you test those friendlies, you can test the Web version at the same time.

Another way to catch it: get your own freaking e-mails and look them over.

But to let that go to a 404?  That’s not acceptable.

You know what gets me to open a sales e-mail?  Promising me a BOGO.  As this e-mail does, but does it deliver?

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Do you see the BOGO?  I’m sure you can spot the TYPOs, but those are different things.  What, nothing explains what the BOGO is?

BOGO is marketing speak for Buy One, Get One.  Unfortunately, EZ Vacuum uses internal argot and expects you to know what it is.

How do they sell vacuum supplies so cheap?  They eliminate the proofreaders and professional designers and have the CEO’s nephew and the rest of his kindergarten class create the e-mail and pass that savings on to you!

That’s an interesting way to boost ticket sales:

 Hey, Mets fans, that awful season was just a bad dream — if you believe StubHub.

The company sent an e-mail Monday offering tickets for Mets’ playoff games.

“Be there alongside your New York Mets as they chase baseball immortality,” the e-mail said. “Go to StubHub, where you’ll find a fantastic selection of tickets to every playoff game — so you experience the championship chase live and in person.”

Apparently, the rude little raspberry was not limited to offering tickets to a single non-playoff team.  I’m not sure if that reflects worse upon the marketing team or not.

I bet many of them have been put on waivers, so to speak.

In this ABC television e-mail, take a quick look at the standard footer verbiage.  Notice anything?  I’ll put arrows in for you:

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Huh, what are the odds?  The links to unsubscribe and to manage one’s account (unsubscribe!) are styled like plain text, even though a link to view the content on the Web is styled, right above them, like a hyperlink.

Accident, or plain good marketing?  And by “plain good marketing,” I mean “tricks designed to keep our opt-in numbers high.”

I received an e-mail with this form embedded in it yesterday:

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Immediately, I beset it with submission without anything in it, and the submit button did not work.  I put in simply d and clicked, and the submit button did not work.  Curious, I looked at the source, and I determined there is not form tag, no action associated with it, nothing but a filled with controls.

And a Click here if you’re having trouble link that verifies your e-mail address and opts you into the newsletter.

That’s damn dirty pool, fellows.  On most Web sites, the quick poll feature lets you have a quick say without obligating you to bu.  This trick poll feature makes you think something is wrong with you when there’s really something wrong with your design.

How charming.

eWeek thanks me for requesting a new subscription even though I was only filling out their quarterly “annual” subscription update.  Additionally, they included a typo in their e-mail:

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You know what I don’t need?  An e-mail with a Euro sign in it.  If you’re going to talk to me about money, use a real currency, please.

In a cast-a-wide-net e-mail from recruiter, I note three distinct bullet styles:

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We have:

• Hyphens (-)
• Xs
• No bullets

I love the amount of conscientiousness spent here trying to woo a quality professional.  You know how they say that when you interview with a company, you’re interviewing the company, too?  Well, I say when you send me your documentation about a job, I see your resume.  And I’m not going to call back something this rife with errors.

Because this recruiter would no doubt take as good of care of Applicant 9748 (that would be me)  as he did of Blast E-mail 298.

An e-mail from Random House includes Facebook, Twitter, Digg, and social networking links:

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So how does that work?  Not well:

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The link in the headline works and leads to the actual Web site, where these links work:

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Random House seems to be generating the e-mail directly from its content management system to ill effect.  Of course, they’re not bothering to look at the e-mails in any detail before sending them out.  This is not the way adults should behave.

g33klady shares an e-mail:

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This looks to be a procedural error, probably made by some volunteer the first week on the job.

In other words, one of those admins your developers trust so well.

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”:

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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:

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This is the sort of thing that gave me nightmares when I was in interactive marketing: minor e-mail glitches that occur only in certain browser/site combinations.

Take, for example, the latest Nintendo e-mail.  When received in a Hotmail box and viewed in IE, it looks like this:

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That’s how it’s supposed to look.  However.

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Scotts grass tries so hard with its Spring 2009 e-mail, but although it provides decent alt text for some images (Scotts Lawn Photo, Beautiful Lawn Photo, and so on), the filename displays for the product image:

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For Petes’ sakes (all of the Petes, seriously), it takes 20 minutes to run a basic test of HTML marketing e-mails where you mouseover the text and check the links.  But that 20 minutes takes away from the next emergency at the interactive agency.