It was 7pm in the evening. I was cooking dinner with a glass of wine by my side whilst my family were playing in the garden. It was peaceful.
Then my phone beeped.
It was a message from a client “We need to change today’s email…”
My heart sank.
That email campaign had been approved and sent out an hour ago to thousands of people. I could not recall it or change it. Now I had to deal with the fall out.
Email’s most valuable feature
Email stands apart from every other marketing message because it can’t be recalled. You can delete a social post, remove a WhatsApp message or change a webpage. But once you’ve sent an email - especially a mass marketing email - it belongs to the recipient, not to you.
It means you have a digital papertrail, which can be damning in the law courts or a godsend when you are dealing with customer service.
It also means that when you need to be more careful when you send out an email campaign and when you make a mistake, you need to own it.
Your sanity-saver: the pre-flight checklist
Speaking as someone who has sent over a million emails at this point in her career, you need a pre-flight checklist. In the same way pilots do their cockpit checks, you need to do the same for your campaigns. No matter how simple your email is, you need to do your checks. Here’s a snapshot of my list.
- Check it’s going to the right people (e.g. list size and segment)
- Check it’s legally compliant (for example, if you include advice or financial info)
- Check who it is going from (from name and address should match what we say inside)
- Check the subject line.
- Check the preview line
- Check the UTM and tracking links
- Check the mobile and desktop views.
- Check the alt tags on the images
- Check clickable links
- Check the unsubscribe button
- Do a final spell check
- Get the client to do their own checks and sign off.
The full list is longer than that, but you get the idea. No matter how good your agency, designer or team are, things do get missed. The pre-flight checklist is there to save your blushes (and indemnity insurance) before you press the send button.
It’s also the reason I love templates so much. When you have a tried-and-tested framework, there are less things to alter and therefore fewer things to get wrong.
What happens when it does go wrong?
No matter how good you are, you will commit an error. It could be a faulty discount code, the wrong event time, a broken link or a frantic call from customer services about all the complaints they are getting.
When that happens, have you disaster response ready.
- Don’t panic
- Work out what went wrong
- Own it.
- Correct it publicly
- Put something in place to make sure it does not happen again.
Emails closely follow the Streisand effect in that the cover-up is worse than the original mistake. Your audience can see you’ve messed up - they’ve got it in front of them in black and white! - so don’t make a fool of yourself by denying it or trying to shift the blame.
Instead, put your hands up. Apologise. Add in some self-depreciating humour if it’s appropriate. Make the correction and direct people to the new webpage or the right competition code. I’ve seen apology emails like this from supermarkets, banks, airlines and universities. No matter how big the brand is, it’s still run by humans and still open to mistakes.
People don’t mind you being fallible. They do mind you being an arrogant arse trying to gaslight them.
What happens if it costs the company their reputation or cash?
That can happen. Amazon caused a mass pregnancy scare with a badly-targeted email, Goldman Sachs mistakenly sent out brokerage information and Adidas had a massive push-back over their infamous “you’ve survived the Boston marathon” email.
Marketing is so used to PR disasters that we’ve got a term for it - the “Ratner Effect.” It originates from Gerard Ratner, the CEO of a jewelry company who joked in a now-famous speech that his products were “total crap.” It nearly collapsed his company.
PR disasters need swift and public handling as they inevitably spill out onto social media. If it’s a case of tone-deaf timing, you need an agency that has experience in reputational management. If it’s legal (e.g. you’ve disclosed confidential information), you need to take internal steps to work out how bad the liability is, before contacting your lawyers or industry regulator. This, thankfully, is very rare.
Aftermath: lessons learned
Circling back to our flying analogy, once the crisis has passed, use it to strengthen your systems. After every air crash, there is a post-mortum to discover what went wrong and how to prevent it happening again. You can do the same for your campaigns. The outcome might be as simple as “get some fresh eyes on it,” but doing so will reassure your team, clients or boss that future campaigns will be error-free.
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