You Made A Mistake: Is It Time To Act?
Posted by Dave McCue on April 2nd, 2009
If you manage an email marketing program long enough, you’re bound to make a mistake at some point. As Forrest Gump would say, “It happens.”
Recently, I received email from two different senders, each of whom made a mistake that forced them to follow-up with a second email not long after. The two different approaches they took showed the value of having a strategy in place for such situations.
The first email was from Barnes & Noble, one of the few marketing emails I look forward to receiving. However, when I opened the message all I saw was what appeared to be a jumbled, text-only version of the message contained within one solid block of text (complete with 60-character tracking URLs scattered throughout). I deleted the message and moved on, chalking it up to an honest mistake on the part of B&N. It happens.
Later, I received a second communication from Barnes & Noble, with the following subject line:
Correction: This Week — Coupons, Exclusive Twilight DVD Offer, Jonathan Kellerman, Walter Mosley, More
Here was the subject line from the original message:
This Week — Coupons, Exclusive Twilight DVD Offer, Jonathan Kellerman, Walter Mosley, More
There are a few reasons I like what Barnes & Noble did here. Using the same subject line as the original message—but adding “Correction” in front—made it clear to any recipients that hadn’t opened the original that this was not just a duplicate send. In addition, they used snippet text to insert an apology and explanation for the mistake in the previous message. In email clients like Gmail, this apology would have appeared right next to the subject line. I was using Hotmail, so the apology, which was called out in bright red letters, was the first thing I saw when I viewed the message in my preview pane. Below that, the day’s intended message appeared—error-free.
A second example of following up to an initial communication involved a less egregious error at the start, but a less effective method of damage control in the end. I received an email from a local Chicago real estate company that let all recipients know the company had relocated its offices into a new building, and gave a contact phone number. The subject line? “We’ve Moved. Your Turn.”
12 hours later, they sent a duplicate of the first message that contained a small amount of additional contact information that must have been omitted from the original. The subject line? “We’ve Moved. Your turn. PART TWO”
The most obvious problem with this approach is the use of “part two” in the subject line. Not only does it come at the end of the subject line, but it insinuates that this message contains related, but completely different content than the first one, which was not the case. In the first example, the use of “Correction” in the subject line made it clear why I was receiving a second message from the same sender in such a short timeframe.
In this second example, all the subject line tells me is that the sender emailed me again (and if I didn’t bother to open “part one,” what possible value could “part two” have for me as the recipient?). In addition, because the message was one large image, the lack of snippet text in “part two” made me think I’d received the exact same message when I saw the image load in my preview pane. Only upon closer inspection did I notice the small amount of added copy that made “part two” any different from “part one.”
In instances like these, it’s important as an email marketer to evaluate the situation before acting. Your recipients are accustomed to receiving your emails at a certain volume, and they are extra sensitive any time that volume increases. In the case of the Barnes & Noble emails, the only choice was to send a corrected version of a message that was nearly unintelligible the first time around. However, in the example of the local real estate company’s emails, the second send did not hold enough value to risk raising any red flags with their subscribers. The original mistake probably shouldn’t have been acted on.
Remember, “it” happens…sometimes we can make it better, but we can always make it worse.
