Should you apologise if your e-mail marketing goes wrong?
Waterstone's sent me an apologetic e-mail last week. I am supposed to receive e-mail newsletters about business books and on Tuesday they made a mistake and sent me one about food instead. So they sent me another e-mail on Wednesday to apologise (below).
The thing is: I hadn't noticed.
Many years ago as a rookie marketer I made a similar mistake and instead of sending our clients the April newsletter we accidentally sent them the March issue again. I was distraught and readied myself for complaints and mocking laughter.
Nobody noticed.
As marketers we build up our e-mail marketing strategy and have a clear idea of who is supposed to get what, when. So when it goes wrong we think it matters. The truth is, it doesn't. The customer probably doesn't know that they're in the business books segment of the database and that they get mails every fortnight.
So my advice would be: make a mistake, learn from it, but there's no need to bring it to the attention of the customer.
