10 Proven Ways To Recover From Email Marketing Mistake

Email Marketing is too dynamic and complex to avoid email marketing mistakes completely. Broken links, incorrect pricing, typos, wrong images. These are just few of the email marketing mistakes you may run into sending your email campaign.

It is important to avoid problematic situations like these, however, it is equally important to react correctly and recover successfully when a mistake is made.

To make the recovery from your email marketing mistakes as painless, as possible we’ve put a list together of 10 Proven Ways To Recover From Email Marketing Mistake.

1. Evaluate the Situation – Smaller Errors

First thing first, not all types of mistakes should be treated as an email marketing disaster and require immediate response. Minor email marketing mistakes like typos or layout problems on specific email clients, may not need to apologise for. It is important that you don’t bother your clients with too many unnecessary emails. This may result in more unsubscribes or spam complaints. May be you could try and fix the problem without informing your readers about it?

We should also remember that minor errors are often overlooked and quickly forgotten. The kind of email mistakes you may avoid focusing clients’ attention on, could be:

• Blank subject lines;
• Typos in subject lines or body copy;
• Misspelled first name;
• Misaligned images;
• Temporary image server outages;
• Emails that were not send on time;
• Sending out multiple emails.

2. Evaluate the Situation – Real Email Disasters

If you made a more serious email marketing mistake that may lead to an actual email marketing disaster, an email correcting the error should be send out quickly.

3. Discontinue the Campaign

Here is an excellent way to recover from an email mistake. Email campaigns are not delivered immediately. It takes technical time for several thousand emails to be send out. This means that if you spot your email marketing mistake shortly after you have hit the send button, you have the chance to discontinue the send, preventing the rest of your list to receive the incorrect email.

Then you can correct the email, send it to the rest of the recipients and apologise for the mistake only to those who got the first copy.

4. Be honest and Act Quickly

To recover successfully from your email marketing mistake you have to acknowledge it quickly and follow up with an email, if possible, include a solution to the problem you created. To make your message stand out, directly in the subject line you may put the word “correction”. However, do not delay your apology to draft a solution. If the situation is that serious that you need time to come up with a solution, promise that one is coming shortly.

Avoid using do-not-reply address for your apology. The mistake has been made by a human, this is not the time to hide behind corporate speak either. Instead, use a more informal language and even some humor. Make the email sound personal, show your clients that you too are human.

5. Inform all Stakeholders

Inform all colleagues involved in the campaign for the email mistake. If you manage email marketing campaigns, inform your client. Having all stakeholders involved is crucial to draft the correct response and to recover from the email marketing mistake successfully.

It is also a good idea to inform client support and social media managers about the situation, so they are prepared if clients ask questions.

6. Technical tricks

Once the email is sent you can’t edit its code anymore, however, there are few other things you could do that will affect the content of the email, clarify it when you interact with it and help you recover from your email mistake:

• If you have problematic links – redirect those links;
• If you have problematic images – update the image files;
• Update any live content, so future opens get the correct one;
• If your CTAs link to a landing page – clarify your message on that page.

7. No Mass Apologies

It is very important to determine who in your database got the incorrect email. Do not issue mass email apologies. This will draw unnecessary attention to your email marketing mistake and will most certainly worsen the situation, making the recovery even harder.

The same goes for social media announcements. It is very unlikely that all your email subscribers also follow you on social media. Replying directly to comments on social media about your email mistake is the better strategy.

8. Email is Short-lived

It is important to remember that mistakes will happen, especially if many people are involved in the creation process. Also remember that people are quite forgiving and even don’t notice small mistakes. Lastly, email is a very fast paced medium and a campaign’s life-cycle is measured in hours.

9. Work on Prevention

When the dust settles, you will have to find out what caused the email marketing mistake to happen. Sometimes unusual circumstances intervene and mess up our work, but often mistakes can be avoided. It might be possible to amend your process or put in checks and altered procedures to prevent an error from happening again. You may consider the following process adjustments:

• Prepare a document to show the message, recipients and send time for every campaign;
• Avoid using placeholders;
• Restrict access to all tools for all colleagues;
• Use a service like Litmus or Email on Acid to make sure that your emails render correctly;
• Check all your links before the campaign goes out;
• Test, test, test.

10. Turn Mistakes into Opportunities

Well if you got some lemons, you know the recipe. There is not a better way to recover from your email marketing mistake than to follow it up in style and turn things in your favour. May be the huge price reduction you have promised in your email is not that hard to swallow financially and it will pay back in the long run.

Email marketing mistakes might be a great opportunity to better engage with your clients and show that you truly care about their experience using your products and services.

At the end we are all human and mistakes are bound to happen. So keep calm and make sure that you react to them on time and with a pinch of humour, because what will stay with your clients in the end is how you handled the problematic situation.

11. Oops! Email Examples

These are few very good examples of Oops! emails, different companies sent after they made a mistake in their email marketing campaigns. You may check the copy and the design of these emails to get a sense of how your message should look and read. Note that all emails use humour to a certain degree, softening the voice of the email and kindly distracting the reader from the mistake they made.

Oops! Email from Fab

Oops! Email from Friendly’s

Oops! Email from MADE

Oops! Email from Shutterfly