From: Audible.com Hear and Now
Subject Line: Your Five-Star Listens: Highest Rated Audiobooks of 2009
Date: Thursday, December 17, 2009

These days I rarely consider any online purchase without first seeing what other people have said about the products I'm interested in. When I received this email from Audible promoting 5 star reviews, I couldn't resist taking a few minutes to check them out. Sadly, the expectations set by this email were a big letdown for me and violated one of my core email mantras -- "make it easy for the recipient".

Notice there's not a single review, testimonial, or product category present in the email, just a very generic CTA link to read the reviews. Clicking through goes directly to a log in screen requiring my password. Now, since I'm a frequent customer this wasn't a huge barrier, but an occasional customer might get stumped here and have to request their password by email. I shouldn't need to enter my password until I'm ready to purchase something, and at this point I wasn't even close to ready.

Everything about this email led me to believe the reviews would be from "listeners like me", setting the expectation that the "top picks" would be in categories I've previously purchased, like Horror, Fiction, Crime Thrillers. Nope, instead I was presented with a product page of 10 top picks (out of 60 total) on topics not even close to anything I've ever purchased or would consider. To make things even worse, not a single featured product had a 5 star rating, nor a link to read reviews next to the stars shown. Rounding out the experience, nothing was on sale.

I'm sorry Audible, but I gave this campaign 1 star out of 5