In a previous post I complimented Williams-Sonoma for their nice use of blocked images. In the same email though, one of their landing pages qualified for my red flag mistakes category.
One of the options within the email is for “Videos – Watch our experts demonstrate new products and technique” My first thought here was one of excitement. I love seeing the use of video in email (that is – having a screen grab of a video that links to a landing page playing that video). In some of my own studies, I’ve seen some exceptionally high engagement rates with this strategy.
The mistake Williams-Sonoma made though was not following through with that targeted landing page. Here I’m expecting to have a video start, or at least be ready to start — hopefully the same video in the image. What we get though is a page that looks like a product category page. On first glance I thought they were completely off the mark with a link-mistake. But after looking a little closer, it’s clear they intended this to be the landing page! Here we have a list of products that have videos. After clicking on one of the products, the actual video is below the fold (the viewable portion of the screen before scrolling).
What I would have liked to see is the actual video of the product in the email image, with options for watching other videos. There needs to be a focus of video content on the site that integrates better with their email strategy.
- Forest Bronzan
