Orange Spain Isn't Investing Much in Building Correctly Working Email Chains

I'm traveling in Europe right now. And one week ago I've got an Orange SIM card in order to have affordable 3G internet on my tablet. And here's the list of emails I've got during the first week:

Are you exited by poor execution as much as I am?

Let's list the flaws:

1. Duplicated welcome email.
2. Confirmation email coming on 7th day after initial welcome email.
3. Broken or ignored preheader area.
4. Spanish language, despite they know I'm on a tourist plan and I was speaking English in their office. They don't even give me an option to switch to English.

And when I've tried clicking in confirmation email I've got this, which looks like an error:

But a few minutes later a lousy looking email arrived saying it worked fine. So did it work out or not?!

The design of the welcome email isn't really bad, but isn't great too:

Overall it feels like the email part of work has been neglected in Orange.

Google Inbox Is Going To Suggest Quick Replies For You

Google is really changing the world, especially email one.

I get a lot of email, and I often peek at it on the go with my phone. But replying to email on mobile is a real pain, even for short replies. What if there were a system that could automatically determine if an email was answerable with a short reply, and compose a few suitable responses that I could edit or send with just a tap? 

They say they will release this feature later this week. It's gonna be fun!

Anaheim Ducks Email Program

I've been on Anaheim Ducks match only once in March '13. But I still get their newsletter and its schedule and overall approach doesn't really work for me.

It's enough to mention it took them 7 months since my initial game visit to sent me the first email:

And what's wrong with their pre-header? What's the problem to invest some devs time into putting something at least readable here?

Another weak point of their email program is focusing only on tickets. Guys, most likely there's much more people interesting in the team than people who're gonna visit Honda Center, isn't it? Why not to try to tell me about team-related content and news so I can consume them on your website rather than Youtube etc?

Why Do You Expect ESPs to Provide You With Any Reasonable Service Level?

When speaking at the MailCon conference last week I was talking about the fact that ESPs mostly don't have an idea how much time it takes them to deliver an average email of their customer. And of course they don't want to share that lack of knowledge with their customers - that's why you never see a graph on delivery time in their beautiful interfaces.

Today I was signing up with an ESP, and it was funny to see "Our email will arrive within 5 minutes" during their sign up process.  My first thought was - "Oh, why to be so cautious?". But then an email arrived with a few minutes pause.

If ESPs can't guarantee their own delivery time for transactional email on one of top 3 mailbox providers - why do you expect them to provide you with any reasonable service level?

Received: from smtp1012.usndr.com (smtp1012.usndr.com. [185.18.53.46])        by mx.google.com with ESMTPS id q13si4359319wiv.18.2015.10.23.04.05.41        for <andrey.sas@gmail.com>        (version=TLSv1.2 cipher=ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256 bits=128/128);        Fri, 23 Oct 2015 04:05:42 -0700 (PDT)...Date: Fri, 23 Oct 2015 11:03:02 +0000

When Personalization is Totally Possible But Ignored

I'm pretty sure most of the worlds largest railroad companies don't use any data on their customers for email campaigns. At least I've seen French SNCF  and Russian RZD sending me only non-relevant campaigns only.

How does their average email look like? Here're the deals on routes I'm not interested in. Here's a new train to be introduced on the other part of a country. Etc...

But these companies are of the ones that know most about my travel habits, cities I'm visiting, my seasonal behavior and so on - all of this because I was buying tickets from them for years!

What do they know?

• where I'm likely to be at this point of time (based on my latest trip)
• what are my regular routes and destinations
• what kind of fare I usually use - economy, business, first class

I'm not even going to mention my age, gender and other personal data I shared with them when buying tickets...

All of that gives a great opportunity to provide me with a really personalized and therefore successful offers which will make me wish to use railroad instead of other means of transportation.

Not Convenient Email Confirmation Flow

Last week I has been setting up an account with my cell phone service provider. I was kinda amazed when after filling in a sign up form I has been asked to provide a code from an email in order to confirm my email address.

Is it really 2015?

Here's the list of the step a person should take to confirm his email:

1. Understand that he has not to click as usual but to follow a different flow.
2. Find a code in a very long text of the confirmation email. It isn't even highlighted with bold or something!
3. Copy the code in the clipboard.
4. Find a tab in a browser with the page of the cell phone service provider. It isn't that easy as many people keep dozens of tabs opened.
5. Paste the code into the input field.
6. Press 'Submit' button.

As a result we have 6 actions needed instead of 1. But why? Because you really have to do it so the service provider just doesn't really care about your convenience.

P.S. At this time I'm speaking with this exact cell phone provider regarding guiding their email efforts. Hopefully I will be able to improve their email marketing soon :)

Linked Has Broken its translation system for emails

Seems like something has gone wrong with emails translation system at LinkedIn: