Email Marketing Mistakes and Nightmares

Email marketing can be done the right way, it can be done the wrong way, or it can be just awful and damage the reputation of a business. Yesterday, I received an email from a social media company. The email wasn’t addressed to me, but some guy named Dominic. They tried to be personal with their email marketing efforts, but quickly got very impersonal by calling me the wrong name. To their credit, the company followed up with an apology email addressed to Kevin, so they did clean up their database mess. But, it didn’t really help with my new impression of them. The damage had already been done, and now I don’t take them as seriously because of that one little mistake.

That story is lame compared to the number one worst email I’ve ever received. It all started with the brilliant use of a stolen email list off an organization’s website, combined with the outstanding idea of putting those hundreds of email addresses in the “To:” field . . . followed by the unsubscribe requests from people using the “Reply All” button – which resulted in the most frustrating email experience of my life. But now that I think back, it kind of seems funny.

After the first few unsubscribe requests sent to everyone on the email list, we all received several emails asking for people to not use the “Reply All” feature, and just reply back directly to the company. Then other people checked their email, received 15 emails and immediately sent an email back to everyone asking to be removed off the list. After that, chaos started and I read some of the worst language possible from professional businessmen. People were attacking each other, complaining harshly about the company, and repeatedly asking to be removed from the list.

By that time I had received hundreds of emails and couldn’t find the important ones. My old Treo battery was drained over and over for two days receiving those darned emails. I was so frustrated I called the company and asked they turn off their server so the madness would stop, encouraged others to do the same (yes, even I sent a “Reply All” to try and end the emails), and the battery in my phone started to breathe again about a day later.

Will any of the hundreds of members of that industry specific organization ever buy the spammer’s industry specific software? They had the worst email marketing campaign I’ve ever seen, and made major enemies of the majority of their potential customers with one bad email. One email mistake is all it takes.