Marketing emails are inherently prone to mistakes. Why? The people who create and manage them aren’t perfect. We are only human after all. However, sending an apology email to your target takes courage and timeliness. It doesn’t have to be a long, drawn out explanation or even a grand mea culpa but it does need to convey what the original mistake was and capture folks’ attention. Otherwise you might be leaving your recipients wondering what exactly was wrong with the original email and why they should care – negatively compounding issues.
Brookstone did this just recently. There’s no epitath explaining the mistake they previously made. There’s no cute reworked image or creative. Only thing that would let me know this is a corrected resend is the subject line. The one thing that stands out here to me as keeping it unremarkable, though, is the fact there’s not enough information. Granted, you don’t want to beat yourself up in your recipients’ eyes but this email has me wondering what was so horrendous about the previous email they had to do an entire resend. And, had it not been that I’d preview scrolled through my emails, I would’ve missed it entirely. The subject line is cute but not what I would expect from a major retailer (online, brick and mortar or a blending of the two). The entire email is pretty long so I’m saving white space, but the content is exactly the same. Seems there should’ve been a bit more thought put into making this “pop” and drawing me in to check out the email again. As it stands now, I realize they goofed and appreciate their attempting to make up for it, but am unmotivated by their singularly changed subject line to do anything beyond blog about it here.
Chris Wheeler
Director of Deliverability
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[...] Brookstone Oops! « The Email Zoo theemailzoo.wordpress.com/2009/10/20/brookstone-oops – view page – cached Marketing emails are inherently prone to mistakes. Why? The people who create and manage them aren’t perfect. We are only human after all. — From the page [...]
We’re all human. We have a client sending an “oops” email tomorrow and they’re using the following subject line I sugested.
“Oops! Here’s the promo code we forgot to give you.”
The original copy has been modified with a hand-written font write-over explaining the error. I think this humanizes what can generally be rather boring B2B emails. I applaud my client for stepping up and acknowledging the mistake and believe they’ll ultimately be rewarded for it.
I agree with you Andrew. I got 2 other OOPS emails this week from other companies and all they said was we messed up with no reason or explanation of what the mistake was.
If you are going to take the time to say sorry, make sure that you are clear as to what you are apologizing for.
One of the ones I got (with no reason) I know that I had unsubscribed from the list, so I assume that that was the reason that they were letting me know they messed up. Maybe they mailed their suppression list. But in that case should they be emailing me again?
We are all human and we all mess up. Just make sure there is truly a clear reason.
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@Peter, I totally agree. Pls note, I’m not saying apology/oopsie emails are bad. Rather, they’re very effective (when used judiciously and not beating your recipients over the head about how you mess up all the time).
BUT, an apology email is still an email to your target regardless. And as such, it should have the same amount of oversight and careful crafting that a normal marketing email should. If anything, it should be scrutinized more to ensure the message is relayed with clarity, brevity and impact. Here, simply changing the subject line alone doesn’t match those expectations in my opinion.
-Chris
I have seen apology emails used with great effect. We have had to send such an email a few times on our client’s behalf. However, I noticed recently that it seems like a wave of internet marketers have discovered this tactic and are using it intentionally. No problem, except it does dampen the effect of a legitimate mistake.
@Dylan Thanks for the post, even if you are calling me Andrew.
If marketers are sending apology emails for everything (even the most minuscule issues), they’ll fall prey to the regular marketing emails. Abuse your recipients by training them that your emails aren’t worth reading since the content isn’t important enough to interrupt.
Push them away. But, you’ll affect the value of apology emails for all emails senders.
@Mitch Are you serious? I suppose you are, unfortunately. Leave it to folks to discover the value of legitimate email and others will jump on it for any incremental lift they can get. If transactional emails weren’t protected by CAN-SPAM, that channel would’ve been infiltrated by marketing only mail a long time ago.