Epic "Your Order Has Shipped" customer service email (2005)
davehyndman.com
davehyndman.com
I find this sort of thing annoying. It would be especially annoying if I bought more than one thing, unless they changed it every time. But that, in turn, would force me to read through the entire email every time just to make sure they really were just saying - it's shipped.
In short, life's short, and I've got better things to do than read through an entire, cutesy email to make sure that it's saying what I think it's saying, and not saying anything unexpected.
It's also lying. I bet they didn't do any of that.
"The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" expresses clearly the difference between "Funny Always", "Funny Once", and "Funny Never". For me, this is somewhere between the last two. I hope it doesn't catch on.
And it's not "epic".
</rant>
Your picture is on our wall as "Customer of the Year".
Combined with the rest of the email it almost comes across as "wow thanks for only ordering a single CD from us you have wasted our time and resources for little profit."
Just my opinion though. It is not a deal breaker to me in that it wouldn't stop me from ordering from them again, that would be my first thought though after reading it initially.
You really shouldn’t even have to open order or shipping confirmation emails. Who am I to complain when they contain a gem on those rare occasions when I open them? (Those kinds of mails seem full of legal disclaimers anyway, it’s not like that additional text would confuse you.)
Kind of annoying because then you do have to read through all that (same message) to figure out that the order actually shipped and wasn't unavailable. Of course, the use of an exclamation mark in the subject line was a clue all was well.
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Firstly, and just for the record, I didn't down-vote you. Not least I can't, since your comment is a reply to mine, but I wouldn't've done so anyway.
It's clear that you think this sort of email is cute and fun. Possibly I used to think so too, 30 years ago. Now, however, I've seen too many of them, read too many of them, felt cheated of time by too many of them.
I don't hate fun. I love having fun. I seek out having fun. I make time to have fun. What's not fun, pretty much by definition, is someone else's attempt at humor that is not, to me, funny.
If it had been me receiving that email I'd've resented the 30 seconds it took to check that its content was "CD posted", and that everything else was there purely for entertainment. I didn't find it entertaining. My tastes have changed over the years.
So, in short, I love fun, have lots of fun, and think lots of things are funny. That wasn't one of them.
EDIT: to expand on this, I don't see this as an attempt at humour through "cuteness," it comes across as sledgehammer-irony mocking the corporate world's shift towards conversational marketing since the 90s. Customers know that corporations aren't really that personally interested in them as a person, they can't be because of their scale. This is obvious. So I see this email as a nudge-wink from CDbaby to the customer, it allows them the benefits of conversational marketing without the downsides, because irony allows them to both "say it" and "not say it" at the same time.
Savvy.
That's all I need to know. I don't have time to read a novel every time I buy something.
That said, I think CDBaby was probably one of the first companies to engage in conversational marketing, which includes emails that look like they're written by actual human beings. (Even if they are (were?) a little over the top.)
Gary Halbert, one of the most infamous "over the top" copywriters ever, was using this general verbiage since at least the mid-80s. He used it with, among other things, his very famous "Family Coat of Arms" mailings, which numbered in the tens of millions. It is a well-known piece of writing among copywriters.
Please put the year in the title if the post is old. Thanks.