I’m on the Toys R Us email list (primarily to analyze their email marketing practices) and received a very useful email the other day. Unfortunately, one of their queries must have been off, as this particular email was not useful to me.
The email (image below) was announcing a recall of a product line. It stated “…our records indicate you have purchased a product from Toys “R” Us which has now been recalled…”
First off, this is a great use of the email channel: segmenting by purchase behavior to communicate important, relevant, and timely information to their customers. They didn’t try to sell me anything in this communication, and kept it to-the-point for its intended purpose (the recall announcement). In theory, this is great but the segment is off. The only thing I have purchased from Toys R Us in the past 5 years was a gift card for a friend’s baby shower. For some reason though I ended up on this list.
I’m not writing this post to complain about mistakenly receiving this email — no big deal. But it is important to note that either A: there was an error in the way they ran their query, or B: there was a mistake with the copy (meaning they sent this to ALL subscribers). If the former, I hope everyone that was intended to receive the email actually did.
Technology is great, and it provides marketers fantastic tools to deploy stellar communications; but the technology must be executed properly.
