Email campaign fails and how to deal with them

No one likes it when something goes wrong at work. Such situations are stressful and very frustrating for everyone: the boss, employees, and customers! When mistakes happen, there’s usually a reason behind them, and there’s almost always a possible solution that should be implemented as soon as possible.

Have you ever been in a situation when a mistake occurred? You can probably think of numerous situations and cases where mistakes are very likely to happen for various reasons. A lack of appropriate attention, missed deadlines, technical issues and incorrect or unclear feedback from the audience are some examples of some of the drivers of mistakes.

In this article, we want to focus on the most common failures when it comes to email campaigns and the best ways to deal with them. If you send email campaigns often, this article is perfect for you. Today, you will learn a great deal about different email campaign failures.

Moreover, we will share with you our top tips when it comes to fixing email campaign issues so that you can prevent them happening in the future. We’ll look at these mistakes from different perspectives, ensuring a wider understanding of the possible issues is considered, and potentially adopted.

It’s time for you to sit back, relax and get ready for a highly insightful and valuable dose of content that will further enrich your marketing skills, giving you more confidence at your job and less factors to stress over! Are you ready? Let’s get going!

Most common email campaign fails - ‘oops’ moments

First things first, why do mistakes and failures like this even happen in the first place? When we have a lot going on around us, we tend to get distracted easily and therefore mistakes are far more likely to happen.

When it comes to email marketing and email campaigns, there are several factors that could contribute to causing mistakes and creating issues that could require quick and effective solutions.

Reasons for email campaigns failing could include distraction, poor information flow, incomplete knowledge, incompetence, tight deadlines and pressure… These are just some of the factors that make email campaign failures prone to happening.

But what failures are we exactly talking about? Keep reading to find out!

1. Typos and spelling errors

One of the most popular mistakes that can be noticed in email campaigns are spelling and grammar mistakes, as well as so called typos, which occur when people don’t know basic writing rules or are in a rush and misspell words. If a company wants to look authentic and professional, mistakes like this should simply have no right to exist! You wouldn’t want your brand image to be associated with poor language skills and zero attention to detail. It may seem like a minor mistake that people can look past, but when it happens quite frequently, you may quickly find yourself losing your customers’ trust and interest.

How to deal with it

The best prevention is direct attack, as some may say. Next time, before you click that send button on your email marketing campaign, double check if everything is written correctly. If possible, get a proofreader to check your text before sending it to hundreds, or even thousands, of people to judge. Another helpful tip is to get an app or plugin that could automatically catch any language errors and correct them for you.

Finally, always take the time to give your texts one more look and never rush when sending anything. Patience and a calm demeanor will work in your favor here.

2. Sending a test email by mistake

Another one on our list of the most-often occurring mistakes is sending an unfinished, test email to your subscriber base by accident. Often these look like a complete mess, and no one would like to do that, right? As a customer, imagine receiving a weird email from your favourite company with unfinished text, bizarre formatting or maybe even some personal notes, without any pictures, titled ‘a draft’. We can only imagine the confusion written all over your face the second you receive and open it.

As a marketer, you should make every effort to ensure that this never happens! Not only is it embarrassing, but it also puts your customers’ trust and positive opinion in you, in jeopardy.

How to deal with it

Luckily for you, some email marketing tools will not allow you to send a test email to other email addresses rather than your own.You simply input your own email when you register and set everything up for the first time. Not every marketing specialist is lucky enough to have this great feature at their fingerprints though.

What can we do then when things go wrong and you end up sending that test email instead of the finished version?

Analyze the situation correctly and try to rate the scale of the mistake. Prepare a suitable apology for your customers. Depending on the nature of your business and the industry you operate in, it could be done in an either lighthearted, humorous way or in a more serious and professional manner. Get creative and try to act fast before more and more people notice the mistake and start talking about it. The last thing you want is every social media platform laughing at you and your unprofessional email marketing systems.

3. Sending an email to the wrong subscriber list

In the same way you can send a test email to your whole customer base instead of just yourself to check, you can also accidently send an email campaign to the wrong subscriber list (or ‘segment’). You likely know how you can segment your audience and based on that, customize and adjust the sort of content that they receive. Based on your customers’ spending habits and behaviour, you can easily figure out what sort of content would be highly appreciated and loved by your customers.

For example, let’s imagine that you manage the email campaigns of a beauty brand that sells both products for males and females. You also have 2 segments within your subscriber list: one consisting only of females that mostly purchase products for females and one consisting only of males who mostly purchase products for males.

Now, knowing their purchase habits, it’s worth considering sending them different types of content, right? Now, if, by mistake, you send an email campaign dedicated for women only to your segment with male customers only, things may not exactly go the way you would want them to. A vast majority of your male customers would probably get very confused or irritated maybe, especially if the email is loaded with highly feminine texts, slogans and images.

As a result, chances are they could potentially unsubscribe from your list, feel insulted, or maybe even block you.

How to deal with it

In this case, there are a few things you could do to deal with this mistake. Allow yourself some time to identify what exactly went wrong with your e-mail. Never rush straight to apologizing or fixing any issues before you get a full grasp of where you stand on the situation. When you make mistakes with your email campaign, the level of severity can vary wildly.

When a failure happens, you should aim to quickly and calmly determine the potential seriousness of the issue. When trying to work this out, things you should take into consideration include: the size and nature of the mistake, and the type of your company as well as the industry and market it operates in. It may turn out that a one time mistake like this can be swept under the carpet, so do remember about this too!

4. Incorrect or missing crucial information such as dates, names, or voucher codes

Creating email campaigns might seem easy, but in reality, it’s far from an easy job that anyone could do. Not only does it require people to be creative, well-read and perfectly organized, but it’s also a very significant and responsible job in terms of remembering important dates, names and so on.

If you want to be effective at email marketing, you really need to have a good head on your shoulders. Otherwise, your email marketing campaigns may end up lacking absolutely essential information like names, voucher codes, important links, dates and so on.

When there is a lack of information, a lot of confusion can be created in a short period of time, causing issues like an increased volume of customer emails and phone calls, the spread of bad PR or even legal steps taken towards your company.

How to deal with it

If your goal is to avoid all of the above stressful things, you should take a few important steps. First of all, always double check the brief of the specific email campaign that you’re given and make sure that all the necessary information required to be included in your email campaign is present.

Second, like in the case of spelling and grammar mistakes, it’s always worth getting an extra pair of eyes to carefully check out your campaign content one more time before it’s sent. If, however, a situation when you send out an email with missing information happens, your goal should be to provide the missing information as soon as possible! You shouldn’t leave your customers without essential information, and the sooner you provide it, the better for you and your company, and for your customers of course!

Don’t forget to apologize for the inconvenience too and add some sort of incentive to compensate for the lack of attention!

5. Broken links or incorrect links such as sending the user to the wrong landing page

Email campaigns often include links for customers to click on and check out. The links can lead to your company’s website, a specific landing page, your social media profile or pretty much anywhere on the web. A problem arises when the link you include in your email marketing campaign fails to work. It can be broken, incorrect, or you may simply forget to embed it.

This is quite problematic for several reasons. Firstly, you may lose your qualified leads and the potential to gain new customers and make new sales. Second of all, your email recipients can quickly jump to conclusions about your brand and might be hesitant to come back once they find out your content is faulty. Lastly, errors like this could impact your job*.

How to deal with it?

How to deal with issues like this, then? Say hello to sending test emails, as well as to A/B testing! Testing and analyzing will help you stay on the right track and ensure that you always send the right and fully operational links within your email campaigns.

What can you do if you don’t manage to catch the mistake before sending your email and you end up having customers reporting the fault to you? Your aim should be to quickly fix the issue and once again apologize for the inconvenience. Get creative with your apology and try to compensate your subscribers for the problem. Trust us, they’ll quickly forget about it and appreciate the extra effort you’ve put in!

6. Misjudged content which is offensive or insensitive

Last but not least, misjudged content that can be perceived as offensive or insensitive is another problem that can arise from your email campaigns. This one can get quite problematic as you never know when this can happen and you also don’t usually have much control over it. We live in a world where people have different opinions and they’re also not scared of voicing those opinions out loud.

It may happen that one day you accidentally use a slogan in your email marketing campaign that will be perceived negatively by a certain group of people. Another case scenario is that you issue that potentially offensive, and provocative content to encourage discussions around it and get more exposure as a result. Is that correct?

How to deal with it?

Issuing an official apology or some sort of statement to avoid legal, and often very serious, consequences is probably one of the most common and effective solutions to deal with situations like this. Again, don’t rush with anything. Take the time to consider your options and carefully evaluate the possible solutions to the disaster that occurred. Try to focus your solution around the wider good of your audience rather than your own. After all, good PR is essential nowadays.

Over to you

That’s about it! We’ve reached the end of this rather short but, in our opinion, valuable article. We hope that you learned something new from it and that you’ll be able to implement some of the suggestions into your life as a marketing specialist who deals with email marketing campaigns on a daily basis.

Whilst we don’t wish these sort of mistakes and failures on anyone, knowing how to prepare in advance for them is important, which was the goal of this article.

If you’ve enjoyed reading it, make sure you check out our other publications on our blog section, where we touch upon various topics mostly orientated around emails and customer service. And if you’re looking for a reliable and trustworthy email delivery service, please make sure you check Coresender out!

That’s it for today. We hope to see you in our next article!