Creative Leisure Systems

Creative Leisure Systems provides a range of stimulating child entertainment products aimed at businesses whose customers often have toddlers with them. The Comfy products are an effective way of keeping restless children busy during the sales process.

A recent email campaign aimed at acquiring new customers and growing brand awareness failed to generate the desired response. So where is CLS going wrong? Are they communicating their products and services as clearly and engagingly as they could be?

Current design

The first impression is that there are too many messages – it needs one clear single benefit that reflects a need their customers have.

1. The header maintains a strong brand identity and inclusion of site navigation is a helpful tool for getting readers to click through. However, as this is an acquisitional eshot aimed at just one of your target audiences, it could simply distract them from your core message. The header’s size also means the most important information has been pushed down the page.

2. The general, rhetorical questions are creating dead space in the email. They still don’t clearly explain what products Creative Leisure Systems offer or why the reader should be interested. At this point many readers may not scroll any further, they’ll just give up. You need to get your point across as quickly as possible, so the importance of prominent clear and engaging, benefit-lead copy can’t be overstated.

3. The main purpose of the email is to promote your products – however these are hidden low down the page. Many recipients won’t get this far. They need to be able to glance at the page and understand what they’re looking at.

4. It’s good that you can click on each product image and arrive on the relevant web page, but there’s no call to action or incentive to do this. What’s also missing is information about what these products are and their benefits, not only to the children, but to your target audience. With modern audiences, it’s no longer necessary to include ‘click on the picture for product details’ – most people will know intuitively to do so.

5. Linking to details of your other products with the slightly cryptic sentence: ‘Do we have what your business needs to move forward?’ is too passive. It doesn’t tell readers anything about your other products and so there’s no incentive to click through to the product page.

6. Telling readers which businesses benefit from your products is a great idea – it’s a handy way to show what you’re all about. But this information has been placed in an obscure position, in a very small font so most people will miss it.

7. Your contact details are in the footer, right at the bottom of the page where very few people will notice them. Since there’s no quick way to purchase the products in the email without contacting you, hiding the contact information at the bottom puts another obstacle in the way of making a sale.

Additionally, although not visible here, the subject line you used (‘Children CAN increase sales, if they’re kept busy’) is too long. When writing subject lines bear in mind they should only be around five words long at most. Also, for people who have never heard of Creative Leisure Systems the choice of words here could be too cryptic.

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