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Email Marketing is simple, nevertheless your Email Marketer experience has already taught you the amount of small mistakes that can affect your campaign.
Reaching a certain point of the sending career, at least one error is inevitable: by a wrong spelling to a broken link up to inaccurate sent segments. There are many reasons of the so called “oops email” that lead marketers whispering meditative mantras before pressing the fateful SEND button. Let’s see the main errors and the methods to break out the impasse.
Wrong links in the Email
To the accuracy of an Email campaign link is assigned most of its success, that’s why testing individually each link is a mandatory step in the testing phase.
How to fix it?
- Send an erratum to those who have clicked the links
- Request from your sending platform technical support to change the remote link, so, who hasn’t downloaded or read the email will not find the error
- Set a temporary redirect from the wrong url to the correct one
Below we’ll show you how CycleSurgery informed readers of the link correction:
Technical issues after sending the campaign
The technical issues on websites, especially on e-commerce, seem to be one of the most common causes of the “oops email”. They can occur due to a down caused by an excessive traffic on the website, or to the failure of a new feature test.
In these cases it’s good practice to inform the users of the recovery operations, if necessary apologizing for the inconvenience with a small coupon, perhaps chosen with an ironic naming like:
Wrong target
Sending a campaign to the wrong target is one of the most feared errors because could confuse the user, and under some circumstances to damage the brand. So remember to check carefully the list of recipients. Shutterfly made an error of this type by sending to all subscribers an email addressed only to new parents. Given the delicate subject, they have chosen to respond to the buzzing on socials with a very consisting apology email:
Wrong version of the email
Preparing in advance for special events is a good strategy, but requires attention when sending the final campaign.
September 19 – the day when Scotland decided NO to the independence referendum – Made.com erroneously sent the email prepared in case of victory:
Given the particularly pressing issue, the fail email led to many fiery tweets. Nevertheless, Made.com sent very quickly an apology email:
The quick response has limited the damage, creating even a sort of empathy with the brands sincere error.
Planning the error
Despite the attention and accuracy, the error may occur during time. It helps in these cases to have a plan B and a good unsubscribe strategy. Being prepared for this kind of situation allows a quick response, which in these cases is necessary to find the right answer.
This plan must determine what errors represent the failure of the brand: typing errors, broken or unavailable custom field or unavailable images cannot necessarily be considered responsible and can be corrected in a trice. Conversely, events that may have a negative impact on the perception of the brand or to change the orientation of the planned conversion, require immediate intervention.
Also, it’s good to know to which channels to entrust the reactions and tone of voice. Particularly, the oops email can contain the correction already in the subject or pre header, certainly a quicker action than changing the main image or creating a new email.
Download the checklist for email testing
Using a list of common mistakes, to check before each submission, certainly helps to limit damage, even before containing them. By clicking the link below you can download for free the checklist:
