Hey! I've had many fails in my years of email, but I have to say my biggest fail was one that I was actually able to forget (a small blessing)! However, recently my company just hired one of our old clients and he reminded me of the fail which, admittedly, I still did not remember doing it, until later on. Call it vanity, call it embarrassment.

One of my job responsibilities is to train clients on our ESP offerings. One day I was going through the whole email campaign process from start to finish and I got to the portion where you upload the subscribers through the integration with the CRM - all going well and as planned - I talked about the importance of testing the email before sending - all going well - I then showed the client how to add the newly imported subscribers to the campaign and then it happened - a simple flick of the wrist and I saw everything happen so quickly, maybe too quickly, as the email flipped to 'Sent'. And with all their partners attached as recipients too ...

That was about 8 years ago so all I remember was wanting to die. But, I want to hope I was able to show them how to stop the email send so it did not go out to everyone. And then show them how to send an email explaining to the people who did receive it what just happened.

The process I have in place today to avoid this to when I am training or doing a demo and show clients how to add a list of subscribers, I immediately remove them - LOL. And just talk to the point of what they would look like if they were there, but never - ever - keep them there in the 'send position' ever again.

My best tip for a situation like this is to not put yourself in a position where you could send something 'live' that you don't want to use as live.

For example, I create templates for my clients as well. for the subject line place holder I don't put something goofy in the event that they forget to fill it in - I think about what type of newsletter they are going to use it for and put something that they can remember to change, but if it went out - that would not be the end of the world.

The same thing for URL placeholders, I put their actual URL. I've received some emails that have forgotten to remove Google's URL sometimes - lol! Or the URL for the company who created their template.

It seems like commonsense, but I think people forget to go back to the basics.

Thank you so much!
VW