One of the many e-mail I receive daily consist of companies either mailing me with their latest products, offers, or simply re-reminding me of their products or services they have to offer.

The latest corporate communication I recieved consisted of a post-purchase e-mail from Argos, to review my recent purchase with them.
The e-mail offered a form of personalisation, which according to Ellis-Chadwick & Doherty (2012)* improves click-through rates, and therefore caught my attention. When I recieve personalised e-mails I usually presume that the company, communicating via e-mail marketing, are offering me some sort of offer or incentive that I would find appealing in order to make a subsequent purchase.

However, there were no apparent incentives for me to post a review or even spend time filling out the review form (the image below). The only benefit I could see from the landing page, was one that serves the company itself. The review required the reviewer to enter their own personal details, once completing the review, to presumably gather more information on the consumer (me) to be able to further target customers with specific (personalised) products in the future.

https://blogs.brighton.ac.uk/sng10/?p=13

Even a simple recognition of being ‘a valuable customer’ may have sparked my interest in potentially looking at the review page in more detail, or even left a review, if more of a personalised emphasis had been made such as… ‘you are a valuable customer, and we value your opinion’. As such, there were no visable benefits, and a review was not left.

* Ellis-Chadwick, F., & Doherty, N. F. (2012). Web advertising: The role of e-mail marketing. Journal of Business Research, 65(6), 843-848.