There’s no worse marketer moment then when you click “send” on a mass email only to realize there’s a massive typo or mistake.
We’ve all been there, but knowing that everyone can relate doesn’t make it any less mortifying.
My heart sinks every time I get an email like this in my inbox...
Because I know just how horrified the sender must be. I’ve been there. We all have. So what can we do about it?
The Silver Lining
We always hear that mistakes are crucial to success, but what if the lessons to be learned from mass email mess-ups aren’t to double check your subject line or recipient list, but rather than mess ups may bring us closer together?
After all, in our ever-calculated world, surprisingly, mess ups can sometimes get better results than the most perfectly proofread email.
Why?
People crave authenticity.
We’re all human, and accidentally not BCCing a mass email reminds us of that. It allows us to be jolted out of our automatized communication and have the real connections with our customers we so often talk about but so infrequently actually have.
No one’s perfect, even Google makes mistakes…
It’s become a bit of a joke around our office for people to send mistakes they spot to me since I’ve had more than my fair share of embarrassing typos.
I figured it was about time to write a blog post about the meaning of mass email mistakes and why they may not really be as bad as we fear.
So, this one’s for you...
The First Is The Worst
I’ll never forget my first major email mess up. It was last year - I sent a survey to our most loyal blog readers asking how I could improve the blog by creating content they wanted to read. Unfortunately, I made a critical mistake: I forgot to BCC.
Seconds after sending, I realized the enormity of the mistake I’d made
My face went pale. My eyes went wide. Why oh why didn’t I install the “undo email send” plugin!
I prepared for the impending hellfire.
At first, it was quiet. Maybe they didn’t notice, I thought.
But the storm hadn’t yet started…
Soon, the emails started.
To make it way, way worse, someone accidentally hit reply all to the email thread and immediately everyone was dragged into a 500-person email thread filled with shameless plugging, angry responses, and quite a few inappropriate comments...
The reply all guy felt pretty bad for that…
Some people were supportive and told me their own horror stories...
Others CC’d my CEO, just to be sure he saw what a big mistake I’d made…
I was mortified, but I survived. And after all that, you would have thought I’d learn, right?
Nope. A few months later, I was getting used to our new marketing automation software, Marketo. (For anyone who uses Marketo, I hope you feel my pain at how hard it is to get it right!)
We’d recently designed a new plain text email template, so I used it for the newsletter. Unfortunately, I forgot to approve the newsletter, and the template sent to everyone:
I was pretty horrified, but surprisingly, I got absolutely no mean emails back. Most people thought I was offering them marketing tips…
How to Save Yourself
Luckily, there are plenty of tools and tricks to help you avoid making this mistake - and help you become a smarter email marketer. The most important protection to have is the ability to unsend emails you recently sent.
- Gmail’s Undo Send feature is great. But it doesn’t exactly unsend emails, rather, it works by delaying your email by a few seconds, so if you spot a mistake, you can undo the send.
- Microsoft Outlook’s Recall works by getting back an email you’ve already sent. If the person has already read your message, they will get another email saying that you’d like to delete your previous email.
- Criptext allows you to unsend an email - even after it has been opened.
- Virtru allows you to unsend emails, restrict email forwarding, and set your email to expire at a certain date/time.
- Thunderbird has tons of features to make email easier - it’s best known for its ability to look for words like “attachment” so you don’t send an email and have to follow up with your tail between your legs once you realize you didn’t attach the file after all.
Another great tool to use is built-in filters to help you catch mistakes before you click send. Let’s say you accidentally “reply all” without realizing you’re on the BCC.
That can be pretty embarrassing, especially if the recipient wasn’t supposed to know you were getting a copy of the message. You can add a filter to highlight a message if your email/name is not in the “to” or “cc” field.
Unfortunately, these tools normally don’t work with marketing automation software - so if you’re using Marketo or Hubspot - double check before hitting send and try to always get another set of eyes on any email you send out.
If you have someone who manages your marketing automation - even better!
We have our content team look over any of the weekly emails I send subscribers, and I also ask the marketing automation team to double check to make sure there aren’t any technical mistakes.
I may drive them crazy...but you never know when someone will catch something you didn’t see.
So, what’s the moral of the story?
Not advising you to mess up on purpose, but going through this experience isn’t all bad. In the end, I learned a lot about my customers through the experience.
While the upset answers seemed much larger in my mind, statistically, I received many more positive and encouraging emails than mean ones.
Too often, we see users and customers as people to market to, not connect with.
While I wish the situation hadn’t turned out like it had, it allowed me the chance to actually connect and be real with our readers.
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