Community Contest: Email Mistakes and the Lessons Learned

Oh boy...let me crawl under a rock :(

At my previous company, my team was responsible for sending out a campaign to over 150K alumns. This email is an external and internal mailing sent 3 times annually to alumni and staff based on their office affinity or current office, respectively. Dynamic to only display relevant content with a global static section. Includes 10-25 offices. It has a wealth of information with topics from the various offices. The global section includes greeting from the one of the leaders, and highlights noteworthy topics. Development time for this campaign is about one month. Various stakeholders are involved in the qc process triple checking links, personalization strings, images, grammar, spelling, etc...At last, the email goes out the door and my team started to celebrate...our celebration came to an immediate end when we received call from the executive office asking if we read the 3rd article below the presidents greeting which read..." A great selection of multimedia asses from our archives"...we forgot the "t" in assets

No matter how many chefs are in the kitchen there's bond to be a salty plate of food that leaves the kitchen :(

A few weeks into a previous job at a startup, we ran a contest on our blog. It was simple - comment to tell us how you would use this product, and you could win one for free. The contest had around 1300 entries. The plan all along was to send a $10 discount (valid only on this $35 product) to everyone who entered the contest as a consolation prize (I mean, they had already told us they wanted the product! Easy segmentation, right?)

Well.. I was completely swamped with our normal email volume, so the copywriter offered to start the email and put the copy in, so all I'd have to do was upload the list, image, subject line, etc. She copied the email from the initial email we had sent out about the contest, and updated the copy. The ESP we were using required that lists be attached before anything else, so it had "All subscribers" attached to it. (I bet you can all see where this is going...)

The morning we planned to send the email, I uploaded the list of people who had entered the contest, and then got distracted with a more urgent email. A few hours later, our CEO emailed me asking when the contest email was going out. I cheerfully said, "In a few! I'll schedule it right now!"

A few minutes after the email went out, everyone in the office started commenting on the email, and I was like "That's strange - they shouldn't have gotten it." I looked in our ESP and discovered that while I had uploaded the list, I hadn't updated the email to actually send to it, and it went to "All subscribers." More than 300k people instead of 1300. Yikes.

Our VP of product and Director of Customer Support were in a meeting at the time. I had to interrupt them and tell them what happened. Both of their eyes got REALLY big. This product was made by a very small-scale vendor, and there was no way they would be able to accommodate it volume-wise, and it would likely go out of stock in a few minutes. The CS director knew that her day had just gotten pretty bad.

While it was a difficult day for CS, it ended up being our second highest sales day of all time at that point. We ran out of stock quickly, but made a plan to send a "back in stock" email to the people who had tried to redeem discount but couldn't a few weeks later (and for that one, I triple checked the list and sent screenshots of the send info to about 5 people). It was all okay, but totally mortifying for me. I learned to always triple check my lists, and to only make mistakes that generate lots of revenue.

I shared this one on the other thread, it's a pretty good one.

At my previous agency, I sent out an email blast to 30k people. We weren't using an ESP at the time, but a custom interface built in-house. The interface was command-line based. The command to blast an email would have the HTML file, the id of the list we're sending to, as well as various flags that do custom things, one of the flags would send the email to Litmus. In the blast, I accidentally left on the test flag in the command, so instead of it sending the email to 30k people, it sent the email to our Litmus static email address 30,000 times. So, if anyone remembers a time a static email address got blasted 30,000 times, that was me. :P

I work for a university. Shortly after I started my job I pushed send on an email to faculty/staff from the President. This was an email with all the bells and whistles: HTML, links, images, mobile-friendly. The content was given to me around 11am, and I was asked to send it at 1pm the same day. A few peers reviewed the email and off it went. After it landed in the inbox two glaring errors became apparent. The first was that the President's name as the sender was misspelled. The second was that the template I used (that existed before I started my job) included a signature that used a common spelling of his nickname. Unfortunately, the common spelling isn't the way he spells his nickname.

So there you have it, an email with the President's name spelled incorrectly, twice, two different ways.

Everyone agreed that I should have had more time to build out the email, test, edit, etc. And everyone took previews a little bit more seriously after that.

How very timely as I just had a "Get up from my desk, pace the office, sick to my stomach, howcouldIhavebeensuchadummy" nightmare about a week ago! We were doing some testing of recent upgrades, and I had set up my newsletter template to automatically be assigned to the newsletter subscribers group. (Nifty feature, right?) I was using that template to test, I added myself and one of my developers to the recipients group and no one else. No worries about sending it... Until I got the first 20 out of office replies... Wait... WHO DID I SEND THIS TO??

So in the grand tradition of picking myself up and just admitting I'm human, I wrote an Oops email that garnered me an above average open and click through rate and a dozen actual human replies, ranging from "Thanks for the chuckle" to "Now THAT's an apology email!" I even had someone tweet me that it sounded like a Fireball Whiskey kind of day at the office and then... he actually delivered a bottle to me. It did sort of make it better.

The mistakes are gut wrenching, but the email marketing community makes it a little better :)

Original email: http://www.emarketingplatform.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Oct-emsights-too-early.png
Oops email: (with live links so you can get the jokes!) http://emailer.emfluence.com/viewaswebpage/A7F0C5EB-0D6D-4759-A4F1-0612D06302D8

Lesson: A little humility goes a long way. Self-deprecating humor doesn't hurt either.

This is the story of the worst day of my life...

To set the scene...I was reasonably new in my role at a mail order clothing company, using a new-to-me ESP (Experian Cheetahmail for the record) and with a list of about 700k.
We pulled in data from two places...one from existing purchasers and one from website signups. I did the email design, someone else set up all the data.

On this particular day, we were doing an offer. Sales were a bit slow and to coincide with our catalogue landing, we offered a £10 voucher with no minimum spend to our existing customers. Each customer was assigned a unique voucher code and we checked it to see that it pulled through correctly into the email.

Yes, you guessed it. The website signup people also got the email....but their voucher code box was blank.

So then we had to send out another email to the ones who had a blank code. Only somehow, when I was segmenting those people off, I used them as the recipients, not the suppression. So all the people who already had a code, got the code again. The blank ones still had no voucher code. 600k emailed twice, with the voucher code....

On the third attempt (I had gone rather pale and quiet by this point, and for those of you who know me this is quite a rare feat) the email finally went out to remaining remaining 100k people of had a blank voucher code.

So overall, I sent over a million emails in one day. I went home, had wine and was relieved that I somehow kept my job.
That said, it was one of the most successful campaigns that we'd ever done, people really wanted that code!

What did I learn? Check check check your data, check for irregularities, check your merge fields and get 4 eyes on your work. No email marketer is an island!

Six months into my employment at a very conservative bank I had a mortifying subject line snafu during one of the biggest product launches in the history of the company - a full redesign of our online banking website.

Everything needed to go right and all eyes were on the email communications. We had to tread carefully to keep call volume to a minimum so our small call center could handle it without the customers having too long of a wait time.

We launched the new website in waves to our various bank brands, so I had a total of 21 email campaigns with various launch-related messages going out for those waves. I wanted to personalize the subject lines to maximize open rates, so I included the bank name for each different bank brand in the subject line.

During one wave, the powers-that-be requested that the pre-launch email go out a day earlier than planned, so I was quite rushed. I copied the pre-launch email to edit and neglected to change the bank name in subject line. It went out to 5 of our bank brands with the wrong bank name. I thought it wouldn't be too big of a deal. But in the financial world, people freak the frigg out when things don't look right. Our call center was flooded with calls from customers who were concerned the bank had been purchased by someone else, that it was a phishing email or a scam, and that the world was coming to an end. Call center wait times ballooned to half an hour that day.

To top it off, I had a meeting later that morning with my boss and the directors of 3 of the markets that received the wrong subject line. My boss suggested I explain what happened because they hadn't heard about it yet, so I had to confess my sins to some of the most important people in our organization face-to-face. In the afternoon, during the the recap call for the launch, I had to (yet again) explain what happened to a group of 50 people involved in the launch, including the director of the call center.

I shed a few tears in the bathroom that day. I thought for sure I'd lose my job for putting such a strain on our call center. And I was terrified I'd get the bank in trouble for violating some kind of regulation I didn't know about...there are a lot of those! Thankfully, I'm still here and the bank names are now inserted dynamically, so no need to manually change them. Thank goodness for sophisticated ESPs...and wine. Thank goodness for wine.

I was working for a startup as a UX designer/front end developer/everything-in-between. Naturally designing and building emails fell upon me.

With the foolish notion that I had somehow transcended our ESP, I used command line to send out our latest product email. I am the king!

1 minute later and I receive confirmation of the emails being sent out, but strangely the total number is far greater than what was on our list. I can still vividly recall the sharp stabbing pain in my stomach. Everyone received the email not once, not twice, not even thrice but 4 times! I am not the king.

Having literally died for a couple of hours I was brought back to life and immediately created an apology email. With a deeply humble subject line and an adorable hand drawn image, the message floated out to our mailing list.

Bad news is that I shaved around 5 years off of my life expectancy.
Good news is that the apology email was one of our most successful emails in terms of OR and in bringing people to the site. It(and I) even got tweeted a bunch. I learned two things: 1) That every single name on an email list is a person and 2) That it's possible to create a genuine, emotional connection via an email.

The biggest impact blunder of my career was definitely our mistake with the Twitter feed in email, but in many respects it wasn't totally even our fault as test sends looked good and then the actual send was different.

But on a personal level, my biggest mistake was sending out completely broken emails without even knowing it at my last job. I used to be a web designer and got "stuck" doing the emails. I had absolutely no idea emails needed to be built using tables, inlined CSS, etc. I literally built emails with <div>'s not knowing any better and I only tested in Gmail (our email provider). To boot, I didn't even know you needed to include a mailing address for emails. So we sent out not only broken emails, but illegal emails for several months at my old job. It wasn't until we kept getting complaints about our emails and found some threads on StackOverflow that I realized they were right. Then I found Litmus, and the rest is history ;-)

*Note: I'm not eligible to win this contest ;-)

I had just switched jobs and had told my new CMO that I was seeing some pretty interesting trends on the website (I was hired to do business analytics, events, and influencer outreach). He asked if I was interested in taking a look at our email metrics from our home-grown email program and make any sense of what was happening there. To say the least, it was a mess and I convinced them to turn it off and use a large ESP that could do a lot more robust actions and tracking.

After getting my hands on the keys to the "new car", I thought I would take it for a spin and do some randomized offer testing. At this point, this was the first email campaign I had ever built. I set up a 10% off, 15% off, and 20% off offer to be randomly sent to our list of 800k subscribers. After the campaign ended, I was going to check to see which offer gave us the best profits. But instantly we started getting flooded with calls: the only thing that was randomized was the subject line. Everyone was receiving the 10% discount. And worse yet, instead of it saying 15% off for a third of the list, I fat-fingered that subject line and it said 45% off.

Our average margins were less than 40% and so there was no way we could offer that to over 250k customers. I thought for sure that I was going to get fired. Both customers and the C-suite were flying off the rails.

Within an hour, our copywriter and designer came up with an email that described the situation and public shamed me at the same time. While we couldn't offer 45% off, we offered some free gifts and gave everyone 20% off. We titled the email "whoops!" And sent it out. I prayed to the Internet gods that they would accept my offering.

They did. the calls almost stopped immediately and the orders started rolling in. It was the best open rate that we had ever received (over 40%) and ended up being more profitable than our record Black Friday the year prior.

Now, I wouldn't say that we invented the fake whoops email campaigns, but from then on (almost 6 years ago) we sent out 2 apology emails a year and it became an integral part of our marketing calendar.

At my current company, a few months ago, I sent out an email that read, "Hi [Customer Name Test], in the body of the mail instead of the actual person's name. This is a common mistake, but not one that had been committed at my current place of employment. Being the first one to make that mistake was not fun. The email as sent to 20k people, so not that bad, it could have been worse. However, since we're B2B, there were possible financial implications that might have hurt us.

I learned:

1. I made the mistake because of an out-of-process change. You must always do another QA run through after a change has been made. We started using a change log for the emails after this incident.

2. THE FEAR is real and is so for good reason. It keeps you on your toes and makes sure you test and test again.

3. Team support and communication is crucial to make it in this line of work. I was lucky my boss understood these kinds of mistakes aren't uncommon in our industry. However, if he didn't have that kind of knowledge, it would have been my job to show him just how hard email marketing can be.

I'll kick things off...

A few years ago I worked at an agency that did a lot of email marketing for a major automotive manufacturer. We supported their dealership regions, which divided up the country into more manageable chunks. We typically sent campaigns to around 30 different regions a few times a month which, on top of other duties, made for a fairly hectic schedule. I was setting up one of the regions and went to test the campaign before sending it off to a stakeholder for approval. Almost immediately after hitting send, I noticed that I had duplicated the lists from the previous campaign—meaning that I had just sent that test to every customer in that dealership region, you know, instead of just myself.

The good news was that it happened to be one of the smallest regions, which had somewhere around 15-20 thousand subscribers. I immediately let out a string of expletives and did the walk of shame to my boss' office. After explaining my mistake to him, we called up the stakeholder at the car company and talked about what happened. Fortunately, no one was seriously upset and they chalked it up to an extra send to that region. While I was less than thorough with my lists, I went over the campaign multiple times before sending what I thought was a test, so everything in the email itself was kosher.

That was my first run-in with The Fear and not having proper testing lists set up. The first thing I did after that was dive into ExactTarget and set up some proper testing lists to keep everything split and avoid the same mistake next time.

Lesson learned: Always have testing lists set up and double check who the hell you're sending to.

Early in my email marketing career I was setting up a segmented list for a email deployment for around 50K. The client provided a suppression list of a few dozen zips codes to be matched against a couple of states. Not super out of the ordinary. While looking at the results of the third campaign, I realized that we had actually deployed to the suppression list contacts over the last month.

Seeing that I had sent and email to the only people in the entire US that the client didn't want to send an email to, I was a bit worried. I notified the client and we then correctly sent the three emails to the intended audience. The advertiser ended up seeing sales from the email campaign even though we had sent to the wrong list.

TLDR: Don't send emails to a suppression list.

At my first job, it was before christmas and we prepared loads of email templates to be send out for our customers. One sendout about 600k was new and very important. My collegues promised 2% click rate.
Guess who forgot to switch on the tracking... The agency asked for our reporting, but there was no one - they had to believe us and compare with their conversiontracking.
I don't know, how they talked us out of this, but after this, we created a checklist which had to be completed before each sendout.

Oh dear - So many nightmare stories from other marketers! And so many of them turn out well!

I was sending an email out to a full database (200k+ish at the time), and duplicated the template from a previous email as it was quite similar. I ended up overwriting the HTML anyway, so I anticipated no problems. The email looked great, the subject line was correct, so off it went. <30 seconds later, my boss walks in. He'd received an email in which the subject line promised him 25% off the whole clothing range. This was not the brief.

I checked, and I had failed to update the text version - which included the old, personalised subject line which over-wrote the one that I could see in the ESP. The 25% off email had only gone to a few select lapsed customers. Now it had gone out to the whole database with a code that was still valid.

After a GROVELLING phone call to the client, who was understandably angry, we had to reimburse lost revenue... But it was the highest performing email campaign of the year.

Check-lists were produced, and i've never-ever made that mistake again.

For the same client I also sent out a Father's Day email: 30% off tshirts for the whole of Father's Day. Which I sent at 11:30pm instead of 11:30am.

OK well I've had a few. The most recent was possibly my best. I managed to send emails to a Canadian customer list in Chinese!

My team are responsible for emails globally. We were in the process of setting up our ESP to handle AMERS data (We already send to APAC and EMEA), some Canadian data got uploaded as Chinese data and wasn't checked before broadcast. The number was relatively small, less than 1500 contacts.

I got notified via our marketing director, who had been contacted by one of our colleagues in the US who had seen the email. I realised quite quickly what had happened and we did send an apology email out within a few hours.

Luckily my director and direct line manager have both been at the sharp end of hitting the send button, with my director joking that sales to Chinese speaking Canadians were through the roof!

Let's just said that I sent an email creative to multiple thousands of people with my own email address in the welcome message.
Thanks to my coworker, this error has been spoted 3 days later!
And you know what? I only got like replies from people realising that this address wasn't their... No more than that.
So now, when I code an email, I DO NOT write any email address, I simply write @@@@@@@@@ to make it evident some value needs to be place there.

Thanks to everyone for the great stories and lessons learned that you've shared. It was really hard to choose, but we included three of our favorite stories in our "How to Recover from Email Marketing Mistakes" report, which provides advice on what to do when certain kinds of email errors occur. You can download the free report here >> https://litmus.com/lp/recover-from-email-marketing-mistakes

I found my current role advertised on LinkedIn. When I saw the advert I noticed my brother in-law worked for the same company and had recently started there less than 6 months ago. So I dropped him a text asking how he was getting on and whether it was a good company. His position was Health and Safety Manager but he suggested I forward the link to him. I sent the link on but didn't get a reply for a good few days. So I dropped him a text asking if he got my email. He explained that he never got an email from me...

Hi Chris,

Missed the r out of Norgren in your email address.

Thanks

Chris

He got back to me saying I should definitely apply as it was in a growing area of the business with some real opportunities. Three months later I'm happily sending emails for my new employer sat in a nice little team of digital marketing specialists. One afternoon the Search Marketing Manager turns to me and laughs.

"Who's Nogren Chris? I've just got an email from them"

"WHAT!"

So I started the walk of shame down to my manager to tell him that although I love my new job and it's great role, I can't spell the name of the company I work for. Thank god we've rebranded!