no parkin' integration

The following was in my local newspaper:
So I went online to book - and got this:

Hello left hand, can I introduce you to right hand

Footnote Nov 22nd : when I rang up to make a booking they honoured the 'special offer' - it would seem you only got the special rate if you asked for it.

how did I resist this?

Not strictly e-marketing, but the ad was online, so ... I saw this as a 'Google' ad on a web site.

Guarantees 14 thousand pounds a week. Hmmmm - must be using a different dictionary to me for the definition of 'guarantees'.

I'm guessing it says that you set up a web site and charge people £39 pounds for the secret - and the secret is that you set up a web site and charge people £39 pounds for a secret ....

so poor, it made me laugh

I will assume you all know how important the subject line is in email marketing - it is the key to whether or not the receiver opens the mail. With that in mind, take a look at this one that got caught in my spam filter.

doh ..... doh, doh, doh, doh, doh, doh, doh, doh, doh

I have no problems with this organization - they host my web site and most of my domain names - and that is the cause [I think] of this problem. As you can see, at the same time I received the same message 10 times. That I have 10 domain names with them is a bit of a coincidence, I feel. They should have set up their auto messaging software to ignore repeat addresses.

product : good - buying it : bad

In recent years I have travelled enough to make it worth while taking out annual travel insurance cover. For the last couple of years I've had a policy with ASDA - a competitive price for a good product [I think - I've never had to make a claim].

Any hooo - as my last policy had finished a couple of months ago [you don't automatically renew if you've no holidays due] I went back to the web site to start another year's cover.

Issue one is that I had to start from scratch - no 'previous customer' link that I could use - or is that a data protection act issue?

So I filled in all the details - and along the way I came across this:

Note that there is no option for 'previous customer', or even 'other', so I picked one at random - which will mess up their data on that issue.

Then when I finished filling my details and clicked on 'get a quote', I got this:

Grrrrrrrr. So I went back to the home page, and hoping I wouldn't have to enter all my details again, clicked on the 'retrieve a quote' - but got this.

As I had not been given the opportunity to see a quote, never mind get a folder ID, this was useless.

On the plus side, I went straight back to the quote form, the predictive text [my PC or their software?] made it quicker to complete and I went through with the purchase - the price having gone down since last year's policy. But ...

... in a very competitive market, had I got the site through a search engine I could easily have gone to a rival when I got the 'sorry ... ' notice.

wasted advertising opportunity?

This one confuses me a little because surely the technology is available to sort it out [IP recognition?]?

When I'm using my PC at work I usually have music on my headphones. I use a variety of sources, one being Yahoo!'s LAUNCHcast.

The thing is, it has ads - no great problem with that, there aren't many - but the ads are for listeners in America - there is up to 60% off men's sweaters at JC Penney this week, apparently. No good to me though, there is no JC Penney's in the UK.