Ann,
I was one of your victims (Oops! I mean multiple e-Mail recipient.) Here's the good news: I upgraded my subscription. Any data yet telling you how your (error-driven) campaign worked?

Hi Ann - I only have 20,000 readers on my list (and yes I got all of your messages). I had a glitch with my email provider and only sent one of my newsletters twice. The result was a bunch of unsubscribed and mad readers.

I think folks have a very low tolerance for the perception of spam. I read that people only allow 11 companies on their internal list of recipients of email. I guess this means we need to be real careful about what we send. Good suggestions above. - Mike

Hi Ann,
Ain't life (and technology) grand? When I received the myriad emails, I calmly deleted them and had empathy for the poor souls who would be taking the heat from subscribers. Hey, things happen to all of us. Let's all be big boys and girls and move on! I, for one, love your newsletters and email notices. Please keep 'em coming.

Ann, If people get alot of your emails like I do, (new ideas for marketing, news on what others are doing etc.), although confused at first, I doubt this bothered them in the least. To me it brought home that your company is made up of humans using technology, not the reverse. Keep up the good work.

Amazing what happens when you respect your community enough to sincerely apologize and explain the situation, isn't it? Good job MP!

Ann, it sounds like you guys did everything you could to try to make up to subscribers, and will do everything you can to make sure this doesn't happen again. I'm curious, though, did any of the e-mail recipients request the greatest discount offer after receiving them all?

I think you did a super job of handling the e-mail situation, and agree with the "there but for the grace of God" side. Our constituancies all expect us to do things well and really judge us by how we handle things when they go badly. You all came through with flying colors and I'll bet your subscriber base becomes even more loyal for it.

I work for a multi-channel customer service software company (we deal with large scale e-mail and web self-service programs, knowledge databases, etc). Our customers really enjoy sharing best practices and in our next user group session, I am going to pass your story along to illustrate the correct way to handle a crisis situation.

All the best and keep up the good work!

I'd like to add my hearty "thank you" to all of you who have supported us so graciously during this crisis. I am constantly reminded of how understanding, forgiving, and just downright cool MarketingProfs members are.

For those of you interested in results, the overall response was, for the most part, in line with other promotions we've done in the past, but the corresponding unsubscribe rate was, as expected, much higher.

I realize that mistakes happen. But they are easier to deal with when you have an enlightened and forgiving audience, and truly extraordinary colleagues.

Yep, I received all the e-mails but I knew there was a glitch. The only way that I can answer this is tell you what I would do (and have advised my clients do in like situations). I would do all the great stuff you suggested but I would have also sent a note with a "we so much appreciate your patience that we want to send you one last e-mail on the subject...and a bonus". In that I would offer a freebie seminar or access to premium membership articles for a few days.

Not only does it show how much you regret the error, it turns an error into an opportunity--as people who aren't premium subscribers, or haven't attended a Webinar might just upgrade (as I understand it was just people who weren't premium members who received the e-mail).

And wouldn't it just be a twist of fate if you offered this as an apology and that's what drove your memberships?

Hope that helps. I think you were asking for advice. And of course I'll keep my MP e-mail subscription--glitches happen.

Thanks for all of your comments, suggestions, pep talks, and all...! (And thank you for not hurling more rotten tomatoes our way...) Much appreciated. As a few of you said...we are human indeed. Sometimes painfully so!

Ann,
I was always thinking to myself... I need to sign up for the premium content. And regularly postponing the process or taking another call, only to enter another world and forgetting to return. Well the other day I received an offer over and over. And although I figured out there was a mistake in the process, I did sign up... finally.

I'm proud to be a premium member and appreciate the valuable content you provide. I know - the next thing to do is offer up some content for everyone else. I promise to do so before the month is out.
/Mike Mohan

Thank you for the note of apology regarding the email debacle last week.  It means a lot to us readers when someone "fesses up" like that.  Not to mention, it could have been any one of us who made the
same mistake!

When all those emails hit the fan, the MarketingProfs hotline went crazy here. Yours Truly gets to handle all of the calls.

Two marketers had the funniest response! They wanted to jump on the biggest discount offer. And they both said that they knew the multi-message blitz was unintentional but that it seemed like a damned effective way to get customers to act. Not that THEY would ever attempt such a campaign, but...

Lawd, I hope we didn't start an ugly trend by accident! ;]

Right, Shelley....gawd I hope not...!

I also saw one bit of subscriber feedback that said, "What's the old saw about it taking seven times for someone to notice your message? You just did it all at once!"

Ann
Thanks for putting in front of all of us a model of the right way to react in a crisis. I frequently discuss the need for a "recovery strategy." You've given us a good one for the sad event that our email program goes ballistic. It seems to happen to all of us at least one time in our careers. I've been writing writing newsletters since the '80s but the last nine years it's been all electronic. While my audience doesn't approach the size of yours, I now the pain of making the kind of error that makes some people assume you've gone "bad" and forever more (although they have no evidence of it) you will be spamming them within the inch of their lives.

I must tell you my secret strategy for dealing with this kind of occurence. I sit back in my chair, take a deep breath and say a quiet prayer for the people that are under such stress that rathering than assuming I had an innocent (although embarrassing) problem, wish to think I've crossed over to the dark side and will torment them evermore with my horrendous suggestions of caring and kindness. Deep breath. Really deep breath.

Many of us will always agonize over the loss of a single subscriber, I'm included in that group. But I must say these days I am adopting a new way of thinking. This week I found myself saying out loud "Let them go. If they don't care about what I have to say, then I don't want to be in their mailbox." Deep breath, really deep breath. Those of us offering information with integrity and care, have to accept the fact that some people don't want it no matter how valuable we think it is.
There's a whole world out there. Thanks again for giving us a great example of grace under fire.

Warm regards,

JoAnna Brandi

I think it was great how you handled this situation.
I think it would also be valuable to many of us if you could share just how it happened so that we may learn a lesson from your lesson learned.
Cheers

Roger -- My non-techie understanding is that it was a simple human error: there's a setting in Cheetahmail (our email provider) to either segment the list so segments each get a different email, or segment the list so each segment gets each version of the email. Cheetahmail should have been set for the former, when it was actually set for the latter. I'll ask one of my less tech-challenged colleagues to jump in here if I didn't get it right...but that's my understanding.

Enough already! You apologised - don't grovel. Rush hour traffic is a million times worse and we endure it every day. Just keep on providing the value that you won us with in the first place.

Personally, I wasn't too bothered by it. I figured it was a mistake and that the multiple levels of discounts were aimed at different tier levels of subscribers. I assumed that some of them needed to be persuaded more than others and that is why they were offered higher discounts. However, we personally jumped on the 50% off deal and took the offer while it was there, so I see no reason to complain. As a Marketing Professional, I can say I've made my own mistake similar to this...one where the entire email list was exposed to everyone! It happens, and I feel that it was handled pretty well.

Hi Roger. I'll just add to Ann's reply. Segments in Cheetahmail are like database queries. We had seven queries setup, one for each of the seven mailings. Each query included lots of variables (example: "exclude Premium members"). One variable in each query was meant to target the folks who received that same offer the previous week, since this was Week 2 in a two-week campaign.

Unfortunately, that variable was the one with the mistake. Instead of targeting the behavior "received this offer last week" we targeted the behavior "did not receive this offer last week." As a result, we sent most of our members six emails. (That's in plain English. The actual variable was something like: "Behavior 27 is not set," when it should have been: "Behavior 27 is set.")

Building highly targeted segments in Cheetahmail is tricky and requires a bit of a learning curve. We were trying something fancier than usual and obviously didn't get it quite right. I can promise you now, though, we'll never make that mistake again. Lesson learned!