04 Aug 06 Bad Email Marketing

A couple of years ago I signed up to receive a newsletter from Village Cinemas, my local theatre operator. They were consistent in sending me a mediocre newsletter, and occasionally ran competitions including one for the fabled ‘Gold Card’ which gets you a year’s worth of free movies. This was a compelling prize and I always entered this prize draw. Now branded as Village Skycity, the cinema operator has relaunched their loyalty program. What was once their ‘monsta movie club’ is now the ‘Film Squad.’

They took a multiplatform approach to launching the program, leveraging their existing email database while allowing movie goers to also sign up on site. This is all good and dandy. Any respectable consumer company today operates an email marketing program of some sort.

I personally, received an email offering me the world if I signed up for the new Film Squad. So I did….and upon completion of the online form, I get told to, get this: PRINT & CUT OUT my temporary membership card which can be swapped at the counter for the real thing. Ok, straightforward enough, what’s the big deal? Well consider this:

• More people have access to a personal computer than a printer.
• As of the end of June 2006, there were ~ 4.03 million mobile subscribers in the country (97%)
• There are ~3.31 million internet users in the country (80%)
• Now consider that only 1 in 2 PC owners have access to a printer at home.
• And that there is a monthly cinema audience of ~1,000,000 per month
• Village Hoyts controls at least 50% of this audience with 23 cinemas around the country

From a marketing stand point, there are a couple of problems here:

1. By asking email recipients to print and cut out a bit of paper, they are inconveniencing me.
2. Only half as many people who receive the email (those that weren’t gobbled by spam filters) would be able to print out the temporary card at home. Others could of couse remember to do this at work….some time.

Now given that just about every single person in the country owns a mobile phone, why one must ponder, did they not make use of a text message campaign? I for one, and I guarantee anyone younger than me would much prefer to receive their membership number / card as a text message. This saves me having to fiddle with printers, ink cartridges and scissors, and it saves some trees to boot! But more importantly, running a mobile campaign would have resulted in a higher prospect to customer conversion ration resulting in faster breakeven and valuable access to their customers via their mobile phones.

In hindsight, they did make up for their initial faux pas in their subsequent newsletter, which encouraged me to just write down the membership number on a bit of paper and tell it to the person at the counter. So I didn’t need to print out my temporay card after all? And there you have it, an email campaign, well toasted.