Email Marketing Mistakes: How to Recover from a Blunder

If you realize you’ve made an email marketing mistake, it is important to address it as soon as possible to lessen its impact on your subscriber list.

While every marketing professional strives to make sure their campaigns are free from errors when they send them out to hundreds if not thousands of subscribers, email marketing mistakes do still occur. If discovered, these oversights can cause you embarrassment in addition to potentially losing trust and revenue from customers. However, the way in which you deal with email marketing mistakes can make or break the success of the campaign as well as keep trust intact among customers.

Common email marketing mistakes that people make include:

Bad URL links
Incorrect event dates
Emails sent to the wrong email list
Bad promo codes
Technical problems on the website

Rather than going into panic mode when either your team or worse yet a customer spots an error, dealing with it head-on is usually the best way of diffusing the situation. Each of the above problems can be addressed in a direct way while downplaying the mistake and moving past it quickly. Many customers are willing to forget an error if something more interesting captures their attention such as a special deal or incentive to make up for the error.

However, how you deal with a particular mistake can depend upon what it is, how long it has gone unfixed, and the impact it will have on your brand. If the mistake is barely noticeable and has no real bearing on your email offer, it may not be worth sending a revised email and drawing attention to the mistake unnecessarily. On the other hand, if the mistake directly affects your offer (bad URL link, buttons don’t work, promo code doesn’t work, etc.), you need to work quickly to correct the mistake so you can minimize the damage.

How to Fix Email Marketing Mistakes

While the best defense against having to do damage control is proper and complete testing of your emails before sending them out (including all links, buttons, interactive media, etc.), sometimes mistakes still happen. How you fix them will say volumes about your organization to customers. Some tips to remember when dealing with email marketing mistakes directly include:

Don’t procrastinate – The longer you wait to respond, the more people will see your mistakes and the more the damage control you will have to do.
Tell subscribers about correct version – While you don’t want to necessarily draw attention to your email marketing mistakes in a follow-up email, sending out a “corrected version” ASAP can dampen the ill effects of the initially errored version. In the subject line, you may want to restate the previous email’s subject line with an added “corrected version” or “updated version” to indicate an error in the previous blast, but not make that the primary focus. You may even want to preface the new email blast with something like “We have updated our deal information, please disregard the previous email.”
Honor the deal – If email marketing mistakes involve an incorrect offer, honor the deal as it may retain or even increase brand loyalty. Your profits may be cut in the short term, but customers will appreciate your efforts in the long run and are more likely to shop with you again.
Offer an incentive – Offer an incentive to help redeem your brand for the email blunder; incentive ideas include:
- FREE item or service
- Rebates
- Current or future discounts
- Vouchers that are redeemable for future products or services
Redirect bad URLs to the correct page – By quickly devising a redirect from the wrong link that included in your email blast, you can lessen the number of subscribers who are taken to the wrong page or frustrated by a broken link.
Connect on social media – If your brand has a strong social media following, consider connecting with your customers on your various social channels to reach them quickly and redirect them towards the corrected version of your email. It’s the most proactive and expedient way to reach out to them.

For more tips on how to avoid distress and embarrassment from email marketing mistakes, contact us today!

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