"Free delivery"… 🥁 5/10
Hello! Are you ready to experience this message?
Hold that thought for a second.
Online retailers are having a tough time right now, so I sympathise with the increasingly desperate emails that are flying around.
Discount codes. Multi-buys. Free delivery.
It’s always hard to know how best to frame an offer so your audience bites. Sometimes weird stuff works. Sometimes weird stuff is just… weird.
For me, the one below falls into the second bucket. I’ve shopped with this company dozens of times over the past few years, often prompted by an email. Today was not one of those times.
Still, you can see what they’re trying to do, so I wanted to share it as a source of inspo.
If you enjoy this teardown, why not flick it on to someone else who’d get a lot out of it? (Or if you had it forwarded to you, you can subscribe for free to get the next one.)
I anonymise the sender to Xxxx out of courtesy. Have a hunch? Guess away!
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Subject: “Experience zero delivery charges”
Are you folks being hilarious on purpose? You’re not normally the funny sort, but maybe this is a one-off?
There are lots of things in life that count as an “experience”. White water rafting. Getting married. Heck, maybe even eating asparagus for the first time. Saving £1.99 on delivery though? You got me!
“Everyone loves top tips. Here's a goodie – you could banish delivery charges with a Xxxx membership. Join today and skip paying for delivery every time you shop.”
Okay so you’re trying to make me feel the emotional fight against a villain. That’s a narrative strategy that’s proven to work in marketing. By what though? Banishing delivery charges?
YOU are the people who set these delivery charges! If you believe delivery charges are evil, don’t put them in your customers’ way in the first place. If you believe delivery charges are justified, don’t shoot yourself in the foot by questioning your own judgement. A villain has to be outside of your control.
“Plus, if you sign up now, we'll give you a month of Xxxx on us. Don't hang around – you've only got until 24th of August to claim your free trial.”
This here is a TWO MONTH deadline. Two months! That’s not urgent enough for a snap decision like a free trial. I’ll tell myself that I’ll come back to this email later to claim it, then let the memory ride off into the sunset forever more.
For a big, scary, expensive decision, like buying a car, sure. Give people two months. For free delivery, two weeks is plenty.
“[Sign up]”
In this button copy, we have our answer: you’re being hilarious by accident.
If you’re going to ham it up, you have to ham it up till the very end.
As in “[Experience the savings]”… “[Banish the burden]”… “[Feel the joy of free delivery]”… not “[Sign up]”.
---------- End ----------
Conclusion:
Email Teardown Club score = 5/10
I enjoyed the weirdness of this email, which is worth something. Anything that makes your brand stick in someone’s head is a win of sorts.
In cold, hard, bottom-line terms, did I claim the offer? No. And I’d wager that’s the main purpose here.
If there’s one thing to take away from this, it’s the value of getting someone else to read something you’ve written out loud to you while it’s still a draft. Any unhelpful weirdness will bubble to the surface. Guaranteed.
I know it’s painful, but cripes it does the trick! There’s an Everest of unhelpful weirdness on my cutting room floor.
Cheerio,
Corissa
P.S. In these teardowns, I mix my gut reaction as a customer with my background as a copywriter. The goal is to explore how messaging really lands out there in the real world. But I’m a sample size of one, so I’d love to hear your take too. Agree? Disagree? Hit reply and tell me!
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