Email Blunders - how to avoid them & how to benefit from them (when they happen)

Email Blunders - how to avoid them & how to benefit from them (when they happen)

It happens, we've all done it at one time or another (including some very high profile email marketing professionals). The campaign has been sent out and suddenly you get a knot in your stomach as you realize that something is wrong within the campaign. Then the emails start arriving, advising you of the mistake. You sit back and are tempted to congratulate yourself that at least you know the campaign is being received and read, but you don’t have time to do that as you need to consider what you can do to rectify the situation. Do you put your head in the sand and pretend it never happened (although as your inbox begins to fill up with emails from your readers, helpfully pointing out the mistake, you are beginning to realize that it will be difficult to ignore it), or do you own up and make the most of the mistake.

What's that you say?.. make the most of a mistake? Yes, that's right. Some very canny marketers actually use mistakes (intentional mistakes, that is), as part of their marketing plan. Whilst I'm not advocating that you build an intentional mistake into your marketing campaign, you certainly can make the most of this situation (or opportunity).

We have clients who, after realizing the campaign has an error within it, have rung us up asking for advice. My advice is this: resend the campaign and blatantly apologise or note the word 'correction' within the subject line. The reasoning behind this is two fold:
1: It's like an accident on the side of the road…people can't help themselves…they just have to stop and look. By doing so, you have now enticed some of your regular non-openers to read your email! Yes, this has been tried and tested.
2: It shows that a human side to your company, which is very appealing to many. It can be a very humbling experience, but it can also be a very positive experience..

Key Point: Take advantage of the situation and turn a disaster into a success by utilising this opportunity to speak to some of your non-readers. Most marketers try to find reasons to contact their database-and here's a perfectly legitimate reason -so make the most of it.

Now, I'm not denying there are negative ramifications of sending out an email with an error in it, of course there are - time, extra expense, reputation etc etc. And of course, the best plan is not to make mistakes-but hey-we're only human, and blunders, goof ups, errors etc are bound to happen. So, here are some of the most commonly made mistakes and tips on how you can avoid them:

Lack of information: What's that? You forgot to add the Call to action phone number as it was still being organized whilst the campaign was being finalised? Yes, this does happen, as Karen Gedney http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3623466 found out.
Wrong information: i.e venue, dates.
Typo: Easily done and easily avoided. To avoid the above errors from happening, always use a testing group. Write a checklist and send the list to the testing group.
Lack of personalisation: I have often read about this happening to people (it even happened to a well known Email Service Provider recently within their newsletter - no names mentioned, and no, it wasn't us), although we've never had a client who has had this happen to them.. If you use Ezemail, when sending a test email, you can be sure that the personalisation is correct if it comes out looking like **Test**.
Old version of the text version: This can happen when you clone an existing campaign. Always be sure to test & proof read both the HTML and text versions before sending.
Multiple sends: Recently a well know Marketing Information company, to which I am a member, sent out 10 emails to me, each offering the same product, but using different phrasing AND different pricing! They apologized and explained that they were testing different offers and somehow a technical mistake had been made in the selections. Lesson to learn - ensure that your database selection is correct.
Symbols appearing in email: this can be caused by pasting directly into the HTML editor from Microsoft Word, PowerPoint etc. To avoid this from happening, within EzeEditor, you simply right click when pasting and select 'Paste as plain text'.
Mangled HTML: The main reason that we have found for code to re-format wrongly is because of Microsoft's 'behind the scenes' code, or any type of scripting. Email's need to be written in good, plain HTML - any other type of code can cause the email client to read the code wrongly and therefore render the email wrongly. Send a test email. Don't rely on the preview tool. It will only show you what the email looks like on the web. The web is far more flexible and forgiving than email, so don't rely on it. The email's code needs to be sent as an email in order to see how the email client will render it, in order to test for any problems

By Kath Pay

Marketing Director, Ezemail

Kath Pay is Marketing Director of Ezemail, an innovative company that provides comprehensive email marketing solutions including a fully re-brandable Agency solution. For more information on how easily email marketing can be implemented, please contact Kath at kath@ezemail.com.