Badsender of the week: Don't know what CNG stands for? Too bad!

published on 26/06/2013,

updated on 19/12/2022

CNG, but what is this thing? You don't know? Well, neither do I... and the Fiat newsletter is not going to tell us more. CNG stands for "Compressed natural gas" or GNV in French (gaz naturel pour véhicules). But that's not the point, if you want to know more, you can always read theWikipedia article on the subject. No, what we're interested in is Fiat Belgium's missed opportunity. The opportunity to educate its subscribers and push value-added content. At no point in the email is the acronym explained. And yet, in its construction, the email takes care to cite numerous advantages of the CNG. This kind of email would benefit from being part of a series of two or three scripted emails. Emails explaining the principle of CNG, with storytelling (a quote from one of the brand's engineers), with a history of the technology's development, ... and finally, detailing the benefits for the consumer. In short, a missed opportunity! As for the rest, email is full of bad practices, with a score of just 1.5/8 (see the checklist). To name but a few:

The only links used for lead generation are at the bottom of the email. The other call-to-actions lead to a mini info site (without lead generation) and worse, to a PDF brochure.
Without the images, the email is hard to understand ... fortunately the ALT Tags are not too bad.
The unsubscribe link is placed only on the word "here" of "click here".
There is no text version.
No link to the Fiat homepage.
A header image that is much too high.
... and more!

Identity card

Generic email information:

Subject of the email The widest CNG range on the market
From : Fiat
Preheader If you can't see this email correctly, click here.
Emailing platform : eCircle

Checklist :

Link to privacy : KO
Link to unsubscribe : Bof
DKIM : KO (bad format)
Text version : KO
Text to Image Ratio : OK
List-unsubscribe : KO
Friendly reply : KO
Mobile ready : KO

Screenshot of the email

newsletter-fiat

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The author

Jonathan Loriaux

I've been involved in email marketing for over ten years, and my career path began on the technical side (email campaign integration) before moving on to sales (as an eCRM expert) and finally marketing consultancy. For the past 9 years, I've been the author of the Badsender.com blog. Emailing isn't just an expertise, it's truly become my passion, which is why Badsender is now my main activity, with the creation of an emailing consulting business linked to the site.

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2 responses

Florian Jumelle

12 years ago

When I think that I'm struggling to change box and that there are big companies like fiat that are not able to do clean emailing... hopeless 😀
Anyway nice analysis, thanks 🙂

Can you tell us more about the sending IP? Is it dedicated or shared? (I would put my hand to cut that it is shared and if so, bad point for e-circle at the level of dkim)
Jonathan Loriaux

12 years ago

Hey,

It is indeed a shared service, and if I believe Senderscore.org there are at least 23 other senders who use it, including things that seem to be acquisition ... not very clean!

And I won't even tell you the face of the SPF recording...

There is work to do!