Here’s one welcome email that came very close to being a great email, but then had a huge flaw.

Refinery29’s emails promise “A daily dose of style, beauty, fashion, and more from Refinery29’s expert editors”. Now, this welcome email would have been perfectly fine, except for one small (::cough:: HUGE) detail at the beginning of the email that shows that their email team may not be the most current on what’s going on with the email marketing industry.

The ENTIRE viewport is a message about moving their emails into the Primary tab. (For scale, this email browser is maximized on a 13 inch Mac screen.) Oh, Refinery29. That is SO summer 2013. We’re not doing that anymore (“We” meaning “pretty much every brand”). We decided that it was silly to send that kind of messaging, and it’s not so bad to be in the promotions tab if your emails are good. Didn’t you get the memo on that? And the first sentence concerns me a lot – Are you reading this on Gmail? Does that mean that there are Yahoo, Hotmail, etc subscribers who are getting that messaging that takes up half the screen? Nooooooo. Why would you alienate so many subscribers in your WELCOME email?

If they remove that block – the rest of that email is actually quite nice. It describes the frequency (daily), the emails they send, (without using the awful “first to know” phrasing so many brands use), and gives content from their social media channels (along with links encouraging subscribers to follow them). SO close to being a really solid welcome email. It’s clean, designed well, and easy on the eyes.

The one other thing I would have liked to see in this email is a callout for the preference center for subscribers to select their location, since that wasn’t in the initial signup. Their emails are based on location (but they have an “Everyone” version that is the default. 

I’ve been getting their emails for about a week now, and there’s definitely more I’m going to write about their subject lines. Another time. 

First impressions are important, people.