JD Sports sent me the worst marketing emails ever!
I haven’t bought anything from JD Sports for well over 5 years, but I am on their mailing list.
I tend to ignore their emails, but their latest one got my attention for all the wrong reasons.
The problem was not with them emailing me, the design, the quality of the copy or the relevancy. All of that was spot on.
See if you can spot what made this such a terrible marketing email.
Here is the subject line:
Keep in mind I haven’t bought anything from them for a long time.
Normally I’d dismiss this as spam but they knew my name which made me question whether my card had been used without me knowing.
So I clicked through to find this:
They had used the risk of someone using my card as click bait.
Awful, awful marketing.
The objective should never be to chase a metric (in this case open rates) at the expense of everything else.
I can’t be alone in finding this email at first concerning, and then hugely irritating once their tactic became clear.
I’d be amazed if anyone bought something on the back of this.
To top it off they then followed this email up with another the same day:
Which led to this:
I can’t work out if this was always planned, or sent because their customer support has been inundated with concerned customers.
The outcome of this? One more unsubscribe from their emails.
Interested to know if there was any response from JD to your article Matt? It makes you wonder what kind of strategy or thought process goes into creating such a campaign.
Hi John,
I’ve not had any reply or comment, be great if they did. I would guess they have seen a record open rate, but also a very high unsusbcribe rate as well.
Matt
Terrible email marketing strategy somehow this will hurt their brand. *sad