Avoid these cringeworthy ecommerce marketing automation fails
We’ve all been there before. The moment after you send out any sort of marketing communication and realize you made a mistake. Yeah, that feeling of “Oh no. What have I done?”
As great as ecommerce marketing automation is, it still involves a person. And people make mistakes. Forgetting to proofread
“One of the biggest mistakes we have made was a typo. I wouldn’t have been too concerned if it was a typo on a word, but it was a typo on the discount for a sale.”
“We sent out an email that was supposed to be 20% off. We accidentally made it for 50%. When using the numbers keypad on the right side of a keyboard, the 2 and the 5 are alarmingly close together!”
“Since the coupon code was only made for 20% off, customers started contacting us telling us that the coupon code was only taking 20% off, versus the 50% stated in the email. At first, we were going to tell them that it was a mistake, but we decided to take advantage of the insanely discounted sale and try and bring in customers by breaking even. So we honored it and updated the code to take 50% off.”
Personalization takes a turn for the worse
“One of my favorite tools from a company called [name redacted] always greets me in the emails as ‘F**k’. I don’t know how they got their CRM messed up, but that’s what they have me as. I’ve emailed the CEO a couple of times asking him to change it, but they never do. I kind of chuckle every time I get an email from them.”
Sending to the wrong segment of your database
Set it and forget it, without testing
While automation is a huge time saver, skipping important details (like running a test) can cause major headaches. Max from Floor Heating Direct found this out first hand when his business got started with social media automation.
“In the early days of our adventures with social media automation, we managed to accidentally schedule an entire month’s worth of Facebook content to be posted on our Twitter profile. Because of the word limits on Twitter, not a single one of our posts displayed properly. We now make sure to periodically check our scheduled posts and never just assume that they’ve been set up properly.”
Using dirty data
Every database needs a good scrub. Take Shareef’s experience as evidence:
“Our client has a database of over 30K contacts. They weren’t doing a great job of keeping the info clean. An email went out to the database and apparently one of the sales reps had appended the words ‘bad debt’ to a client name to denote a delinquent balance. So the greeting on the email went out addressing the client “Dear Curtis Bad Debt.
The moral of the story here is, as difficult as it may be, it’s critical to periodically “scrub” your database to make sure all the fields are correct and, of course, the emails are still good.”
The bottom line
Humans make mistakes. Computers are operated by humans. When in doubt, grab another set of eyes to double check your work. And for goodness sake, CLEAN YOUR LIST. </End rant>
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