Apple’s Mother’s Day Email Fail

Apple are so often adorned and praised for their marketing that any sort of backlash seems to come as quite a surprise (Apple maps apart), but that’s what happened when they sent out an acquisitional email for Mother’s Day for an iPad.

The timing of this campaign is great; Mother’s Day is in 2 weeks so now is the time when people will be thinking about what to get their Ma, and an email promoting a product will definitely get attention; but an iPad? Don’t get me wrong I love my Mum, but a £300 purchase just isn’t going to happen.

Within minutes of this email being sent at 10am on February 28th, “iPad” was trending on Twitter in the UK.

The importance of subject lines is undeniable and Apple certainly pulled a superb one out of the bag; “Surprise mum with a new iPad”; as you can expect it resulted in a number of humorous reactions. The general consensus seems to be that this is far too much of a luxury product to give your mum for mother’s day, no matter how much you love her…

Having a laugh?

Cheers Apple

It does beg questions about Apple’s segmentation and also suggest that ‘batch and blast’ is still very much the process for many leading brands.

For Apple specifically this isn’t a rare occurrence either; I have received a number of these acquisitional emails over the last 4 months: Xmas (understandable), Valentine’s Day (possibly not, does that make me a bad boy friend?) and Thanksgiving (I’m English!)

I can’t help thinking that with a little more thought given to list management and segmentation Apple’s email campaigns could be a whole lot more effective. The data they hold for customers and users must be vast so why not use it? Does someone who buys a track on iTunes get the same emails as someone who bought a MacBook Pro? It seems to be the case. At the very least surely country specific holidays have got to be taken into account.

So does it really matter?

The short answer is ‘no’, it’s a high order value product so if only a few people were to act on this email and purchase one Apple would add to their considerable profit margins. However by being more intelligent with campaigns they could increase interaction and engagement as well as avoid any embarrassing (and humorous) tweets from ill targeted users.