6 Email Marketing Fails (To learn from!)

To err is human, but to goof up your email marketing, well that can be damaging!

Email marketing is one of the most popular marketing strategies. It’s also prone to human errors. Many marketers, both seasoned and novice have committed email faux pas: some are laughable, some forgivable and some simply catastrophic.

Here are a few epic email marketing fails that can teach us a thing or two.

1. To AutoCorrect or not to All of us make mistakes, spelling and typos especially. At times Spelling and Grammar Check comes to our rescue and sometimes they too miss the context.

Sample this e-mail excerpt

“If you have a blog, web show or podcast and have been asking yourself that question: “How the heck do I make money from this in a really cool way that is sleazy?” this is going to be for you.”

You may use a dash of humor to address your mistake like the sender in the above example did and immediately reverted with the corrected version:

“Whoops worst typo ever in the last email I just sent.

Wow that was classic. This is what happens when caffeine wears off. Here is the sentence I wrote in the last email:

“If you have a blog… …that is sleazy?” this is going to be for you.”

2. Copy Cat: Most of us are guilty of copying and pasting content that is meant to be reproduced as it is. What we forget is that a lot of things can get lost in translation like symbols, dates and time, formatting etc.

Many content publishing tools add erroneous characters (owing to differences in formatting), while copying directly from as Word Document to email, so what happens is that the message looks garbled. The key is to copy paste text to a simple text editor like Notepad which removes extra formatting and saves you from embarrassment.

3. Wrong Token: Ok! We send out emails for the recipients to open them and for that, we write catchy subjects and click-bait lines, but do we need to announce it to our readers? Well, TopMan landed in a soup for its ‘click-bait header’

Clearly, someone didn’t understand the use of tokens for emails to be sent for mass campaigns.

The only way to escape such a gaffe is to double check your emails, get someone to review everything once before the campaign is sent out. If you still make an error though, an instant (and maybe funny!) apology and some incentive to please your recipients should be on the way, as soon as you discover the error.

4. Wrong Number: Sending the wrong message to unintended recipients because segmenting got all wrong can cause confusion, annoyance and may sometimes hit a sensitive nerve.

Shutterfly inadvertently sent out an email to its entire subscriber database, congratulating them for becoming new parents. It definitely hurt the sentiments of those struggling with fertility issues or those who had gone through a miscarriage.

Shutterfly’s management swiftly moved into damage control mode and sent out an email apologizing and explaining why it happened. The message was sincere and crisp, where their CMO stepped up and accepted responsibility for the entire fiasco. This demonstrated their genuine concern for their customers.

5. No-where to Go

Read More at https://www.martechadvisor.com/articles/marketing-automation-2/6-email-marketing-fails-to-learn-from/