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Email marketing is a fast-moving, high-volume, high-reach channel, so mistakes should almost be expected. While I hope you can stave off the inevitable forever, it's best to have disaster planning in place so you can react quickly-just in case.
Start by defining possible mistakes and then laying out the appropriate response, recognizing that every mistake doesn't warrant a response-and that sending an apology email is just one of many possible responses. Most brands won't send a single apology email over the course of a year, and in recent years less than one-tenth of one percent of email volume is apologies for email mistakes. To say that apology emails are rare is a colossal understatement.
DEFCON 5: Shake It Off
For benign mistakes like typos and minor rendering or formatting issues, it's best just to let it go. Small errors are likely to go unnoticed and will be understood as errors if they are noticed.
Temporary issues that don't dramatically impair your emails or your website are also worth letting go. For example, in 2011, B&H Photo Video had some kind of problem with the server hosting their email images. Thankfully, their emails make great use of defensive design techniques like using HTML text and alt text, so the message wasn't all that impaired by the lack of images. But even if their emails hadn't been so well designed, it still wouldn't have warranted action.
Even some deployment mistakes fall into this category, so long they don't cause any material damage. For instance, in 2007, Drs. Foster & Smith sent out a "Happy Thanksgiving" season's greeting email a full week early. They didn't send an apology or resend it the following week. They just let it stand as an early season's greeting and moved on, which was the sensible thing to do.
DEFCON 4: Triage on the Backend
For less benign errors like emails with serious rendering or formatting issues, sent at the wrong time, or missing minor content, take actions to mitigate the damage that don't involve sending any additional emails.
Possible actions include:
For example, last year, Amazon.com accidentally sent out an email promoting BCS championship gear 24 hours before the game was to take place. They sent an apology, but it was really unnecessary as it was clearly an error to those likely to buy the gear. Rather than sending an apology email, they could have made it clear on the landing page that the products would become available after the game "tomorrow" and responded to social chatter about the error in that channel. And then they could have just sent the BCS championship gear email after the game as originally planned.
In this case, sending an apology email just drew more attention to the mistake and caused the whole issue to become overblown.
DEFCON 3: Targeted Resend
For significant errors that only affect a small portion of your email subscribers, consider sending an apology email or a resend of the original email with a message of explanation at the top that's segmented only to those affected.
For instance, if you send subscribers personalized discount codes and your website wasn't set up properly to accept those codes at the time of the send, then you could send an apology email to just those subscribers who tried to use their codes, telling them that the issue has been fixed and to please try again.
Before resending an email like this, it's a good idea to check your email analytics just to make sure that the email is seriously underperforming. Sometimes things aren't as bad as you think.
DEFCON 2: Email Apology
For a serious mistake that stays localized to your email subscribers, an apology is necessary to clear things up and mend the relationship.
A good example of this kind of mistake would be when a company that owns or services multiple brands accidentally sends a message intended for the subscribers of one brand to the subscribers of another brand. For example, in July of 2013, email marketing agency Alchemy Worx accidentally emailed a rendering test send for one of its clients to subscribers of the agency's newsletter. They handled the situation well, responding quickly with a simple email that apologized and explained the mistake in a single, clear sentence.
Permission is sacred. Accidently violating it is worth apologizing for and making it clear to subscribers that they won't receive any more messages from the brand-with the subtext being, "Please don't mark that email as spam."
DEFCON 1: Full-Spectrum Apology
Sometimes mistakes are particularly harmful or hurtful, and in these cases it's all hands on deck-sending an email apology to subscribers, reaching out via social media, and making statements to the media.
Such ill fortune struck Shutterfly last month when an email congratulating new moms was accidentally sent to a "large group of customers" who didn't recently have a child. For the recipients who had had miscarriages or difficulties conceiving, the email caused them genuine pain-and some made their feelings known via social media. In response, Shutterfly wisely and appropriately sent an email apologizing, tweeted an apology, and responded to media inquiries about the issue with more apologies.
Make every effort to put processes in place to minimize the risk of mistakes, but human or technological error will eventually find a way to slip through. Matching up various scenarios with a plan of action helps you avoid over- or under-reacting in the heat of the moment.
