What's wrong with your favourite brands mailers and websites?
Every now and again I tend to look at my favourite brands websites, to see if I can spot any issues with their website or mailers which I've subscribed to, which should be perfect, but in a real world environment it is never the case.
For example, prior to sending off the mailers, they should be checking the mailer and double checking it. Does the links work? If I cut and paste the link into the webbrowser does the link work? Do I get any 404 errors when checking the links? If you do, contact the person who puts your mailer templates together to fix it. I spotted a glaring error with the one link on the Clickatell's balance update mailers. If you cut and paste their "unsubscribe" link at the bottom of the mailers you get a nice 404 page. Basically they have a whitespace between before brocure on the text copy of the link which reads http://www.clickatell.com/ brochure/unsubscribe.php, when it should be http://www.clickatell.com/brochure/unsubscribe.php.
Also they were using mailing lists to promote purchasing SMS credits with a discount and some bright kiddies decided to mail the mailing list and would you believe it their mails were sent to everyone on the mailing list in question! Another big no no! One could mail the list and set return read reciept, and you get a nice list of users subscibed to the list, which isn't a good thing (tm).
I think that the moral of the story is that communications should always be checked. No matter how trivial they seem having a few people checking them for the obvious errors from spelling to links not working is as important as the copy in the mailer.