Imagine being a big company, let’s say Electronic Arts (revenue: $3,8 billion last year). Imagine launching Battlefield 3, and wanting to inform the correct audience about the game. Surely you have a marvellous email campaign set up to do just that, right?
Wrong, apparently. According to Loren Norman (and a few others) he received an email with the cryptic subject line “System requirements for PC players” which contained the message below:
Loren pointed out two things, besides never having asked for this:
The subject line really is marvellous – even though the sender name is Battlefield 3, the actual email does not contain PC system requirements! Next to that is the transactional part: this would only be possible had Loren been a member of the EA-network and/or a customer. Here comes the biggest goof: Loren notes that he hasn’t done anything with EA in 5 years…oh dear. Talk about bad list management.
Just recently I posted ‘It is not ok to start mailing an old list…ever‘ but it seems it was a wishful post – EA has gone the other way. There are more complaints too, so it doesn’t seem to be a minor glitch. Even worse, some people considered it a scam email, so it will not have been very helpful in the reputation department either.
Clearly EA needs to get its act together. The subject line is not acted upon in the email, the sender name (Battlefield 3) does not go with the information in the footer (sent to you by EA) and worst of all: they should have no idea of his existence anymore. Last they had business with him was over 5 years ago: that’s forever in fast-moving times these days.
Let’s hope there won’t be more of this from either big or small names in the business.
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I don’t understand what is so misleading with the subject line, Origin is a needed to play the game thus labelled a System Requirement, what wrong with that? EA’s mailing list may be out of date but I wouldn’t call this a misleading email by any means, I mean I actually pre-ordered the game, am part of EA’s mailing list and knew that Origin is needed and I haven’t even received an email!
What is misleading (imho, of course) is the fact that it says ‘system requirements’, where I would think about hardware. The content talks about the Origin client, which is software on the level of the Steam client. If the subject line was ‘Newest version Origin client needed for playing Battlefield 3’ it would be much clearer.
With you actually NOT receiving this email while being part of the list and having pre-ordered the game means they have goofed up there too: you should be one of the people actually receiving this email 🙂