#Emailgeeks: When email marketers goof & how to fix it.
I goofed.
And I felt beat about it.
Many hours — days even, and a lot of hardwork — were put into creating what could have been my best email campaign only for it to be foiled in the last breath by a personalization error :(
So, over the weekend I questioned the meaning of life, and spent the rest time crawling the web for marketers sharing their marketing mistakes, and maybe even find a support group for marketers that have made major blunders.
I didn’t find a support group, but I found plenty blunders some of which are all too familiar to me. Here are some for your reading pleasure:
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.
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 ;-)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.
These are just a few of what the web had to offer.
Email Marketers have got it tough, they’re the most unloved of the digital marketing bunch, but have the most tedious and deliberately intentional tasks as marketers. Never mind that they have to juggle many skills, but to the uninitiated it just looks like they press the “Send” button.
Unlike every other online marketing channel where mistakes can easily be corrected or deleted, once you goof on an email campaign you’ll spend the weekend caught up in the reason of life — and love the taste of alcohol.
So to every email marketer out there, I stand in solidarity with you (spammers are not invited to this solidarity group).
To avoid such a future scenario, I revised my email checklist which I will be sharing with you. Hopefully, it helps a lot.
Create a small group of people that’ll review every email. You don’t want it to be more than 2- 3 people. Too many reviewers could cause more goofs.
Campaign Set up: Whoever hits the Send button for a campaign has to be responsible for this. This is a no-brainer!
Email Design & Coding: If this is a template you intend to use recurringly, then the project manager has to ensure every item on the check list is met.
Product Information: You’ll definitely want someone pedantic to handle this. Especially if they love to obsess over grammar mistakes.
Email Copy: You’ll want someone pedantic to handle this too.
Buttons, Images and Links: Got an intern on your team, then make him responsible for something.
Other notes: Sometimes, your ESP is to blame for your goofs as they affect the way your emails render in an email client, and I’ve witnesses this with both Mailchimp and Sendy. This is why it’s important to test across multiple email clients.
Several email marketers also testify that on a major goof (like sending out 45% discounts to your 80,000 customers rather than your 1,000 loyal customers), an apology mail works wonders, sometimes even more than Black Friday emails. A marketer even joked of intentionally goofing off once every year to get the transaction volumes he got from his first ever apology email.
Scott Pelham from Barcky wrote an interesting post on when to send apology emails. Check it out.
That’s my guide. If you have any contributions, leave a comment.
Now every goof can easily be caught, hopefully :)
EDIT: Since implementing the checklist and following it dutifully, we’ve easily caught all email errors until recently when an email with an apostrophe error in the headline went out. Dammit!
