How to recover e-mail marketing mistakes
At some time, in some e-mail marketing, mistakes are prone to happen. How you handle those mistakes, is what marks the difference for a customer to stick around or lose trust in your company.
Consider and decide whether any action is necessary to rectify the mistake. If you sent out an e-mail with a place holder or spelling error, it may not be necessary to send out an apology mail. In most cases it only blows up your mistake which may have gone unnoticed.
If your error was a spelling mistake or a wrong/broken link, you can probably handle it yourself very simply. But if you sent out a 50% discount offer instead of a 5%, you need to get more people involved in the discussion and strategy around the correction. You need to act quickly, however you cannot add to the error by offering something the company cannot deliver.
See how many people have been affected (or reached) by using analytics. For example, if you sent out an e-mail with the wrong link, you can quickly move your webpage to the address in the e-mail. Nobody will know the difference apart from those who clicked through. These people are the only ones you have to follow up with and ask to click through again.
Sometimes your e-mail can go around very quickly much farther than your mailing list as viral mails as a result of social marketing networks. You may think the only people who will know about your mistake are the ones who are receiving your e-mails. You can track your mistake and check the attention it’s getting on social websites. If people are upset, they are going to post it or blog about it in the social world. If you do read some such thing, make sure you address it then and there. Also immediately act via e-mail.
You can give your mistake a positive spin. This could become a way to boost revenue. McDonald explained how one of its customers made a mistake by sending out the wrong pricing on a product. An apology was sent out to everyone on the mailing list and an offer of free shipping and 10% off was provided. As a result, the company saw a 75% open rate, 25% click-through rate and 10% conversion.
If you offer an apology that provides a special discount or incentive, give a time limit. You do not want a customer to try after 48 hours to see that the offer is not valid anymore. But make sure that the time limit is realistic. Providing an offer for more than 3 days may not be a smart solution to a mistake.
Unless if it is a weekly e-mail, where customers may wait till the next communication, e-mail corrections should necessarily happen within 24 hours. While more than 90% of follow up apology mails reach in 48, the purpose is to rectify the mistake while it is still fresh in the minds of readers. If it goes beyond that, it is really another mistake.
Choose the right repair procedure. In simple, short and precise language explain your mistake, offer an apology and provide the correction. Personalizing it is a good idea. Provide a name at the FROM column and at the end of the e-mail, just so that the customer knows that it is coming from a human source rather than an automatically generated reply.
The goal is to give your customers the right message through e-mail marketing. However, when situations arise wherein you have to rectify a mistake don’t hesitate to step up to it and graciously accept and apologize for it.