In my last email marketing post, I highlighted several email mistakes that companies can make. I ran into my newspaper reporter friend tonight and his story inspired me to write part two: Email Marketing – The Emails Strike Back.

A long time ago (meaning tonight), in an establishment not far away, I listened to the reporter’s story. We’ll call him Jerry. The newspapers are hurting as we all know, but some of us saw this four or five years ago and don’t feel very sorry for their inability to adapt (OK, I’ll save that for another post.) Jerry lost his job last year when the local newspaper closed. What a terrible field to be in right now, huh?

The story started out talking about someone we both knew, a friend named Bill. Jerry ran into Bill and reminisced about the email disaster they had received while looking for employment. Bill and Jerry both applied for the same government position. The online process to apply for the position was long and tedious, as you can imagine for a government job. After spending hours filling out the application form and expecting to never hear back . . . they both received an email about a month later.

It was the classic “your application was denied” story, but this email was much better. The intern, or senior manager, who sent the email put all of the applicants’ emails in the TO field. All denied applicants could see the email addresses of other denied applicants, and Bill and Jerry realized they applied for the same job. Both emailed each other with confusion, the federal government would send an email like that to everyone?

Quickly the “reply all” emails started spreading, with disappointed and frustrated applicants complaining, laughing, and noting: “Only the federal goverment!”

My friend Jerry thinks he got about 400 – 500 emails from everyone before it was all over, and it must have been a nightmare for the government agency. Who would have thought the big boys needed help with sending email? A simple email marketing mistake can happen to all of us, no matter how big or small.

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.

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