Kirkland’s Welcome Email

Most email marketing experts will agree that the welcome email is almost the single most important email a company can send.  Its the first interaction a subscriber has of the brand in an email relationship and affords the company a great opportunity to make a generous offer or welcome the user to the program.  With that in mind, I like to review welcome emails that I get.

So I dig Kirkland’s. I shop there with my wife and we sometimes get some good deals.  As I passed one on my way to work the other day, I felt compelled to sign up for their email program and see what comes  of it.  To start, I received the welcome email almost immediately after signing up which is a good thing.  They have a pre-header (I am a pre-header snob) and asked me to white list them, which is another good thing.  Then the rest of email goes down from there.  While the header was linked, pretty much nothing else was.  In my image below you will see arrows which point to spots on the email which are not linked.  The only other place which is linked in the body of the email is the offer of “click here”  bubble which is in an odd spot and it happened to be below the fold in gmail.  Needless to say, Kirkland’s is missing a HUGE opportunity here, because all I get is an email with pictures that I can’t click, a weird offer and nothing about the program I just joined.

Kirkland’s needs some help and I would be glad to help them free of charge if they want some advice.  I welcome your input.

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