The Email Mistake I Made that Turned Into a Big Success

TODAY'S EPISODE:

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Hello, and welcome to episode number 28 marketing interruption. I'm your host Andrew Maffettone and today is story-time I'm going to tell you a little bit about a email marketing mistake I made years ago ago that leveraged some of the best data and some of the best numbers I've ever seen. So, a little bit of background. years ago, this was probably five years ago, maybe five or six years ago. Before I was in the agency I was in I was technically not an agency. I was running marketing for a founder who had several companies. So it's kind of like an agency, but it wasn't anyway, one of the things he ran was a sass company. And we were targeting e commerce sellers. And what I did was I kind of helped build out, you know, their marketing. And one of the things we did is we had a bunch of we did a big content play a ton of blog posts, and we were doing I think, a weekly newsletter. I think it was weekly, and he had a very

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boisterous email list. Typically, people would typically respond to this stuff. They usually were under the assumption that he was the one sending the emails not always But sometimes, and this was a relatively promotional email, it wasn't a discount anything like that. It was kind of like, here's a bunch of blog posts that we had written. Here's some stuff going on in the news. It was kind of more of an e commerce informational weekly, newsletter we did. Anyway. So I sent out this email. And I don't know what happened. Maybe I was in a rush, maybe something. I always send emails to myself and test them and look at them a phone and a tablet and just kind of double check everything. And for some reason, I just didn't do this this day. So I sent out this email, come in the office. I think our emails around them are going out of the gate in the morning, coming to the office, and I have so many emails, like a ridiculous amount in comparison to wonder only had a couple of the other people in the office were just like, Dude, what happened? Like, I don't know, what are you talking about? Well, there was a blatant spelling error in the subject line. There was a real bad spelling error in the snippet, then there was probably two or three more spelling errors within that email. And one really obvious one, like right in the title right when you open it, I don't know what happened. I don't know why I didn't do it. Why didn't look I usually I must have just breeze through it. I can't remember what the hell happened. But this email goes out. So we got I wrote, wrote it down on what happened here. So our open rates were typically 25 30%. For these types of emails. This specific email was like 47 and a half, almost half the amount of people that got it open it, the click rate was usually like a three to 5%. This was 12. Like it was nuts in comparison of basically doubling our metrics across the board. I didn't have a metric for a response rate. But if I did, this would be more than double. So many people email bailed us and a couple people off tried to take my job which fuck that guy. But they were like, Oh, he, you know, if he's not paying attention to this, then what else? Isn't he paying attention to when I could do this better? And if you're hiring let me know. It was really like, Alright, you took your shot. A bunch of people responded or just like, Hey, you made a typo. Some people were super nice about it like, Oh, no, can't believe this happened. Here's what you did wrong. But still great newsletters. I mean, that was a ton of responses. And I was like, finally do I was panicking. I was so pissed. I was so upset because I try not to do that kind of stuff. And so here's, here's what I did. So my thought was, I need to bounce back from this and I can't send another email apologizing for typos. I can't send another email the following week and just pretend it never happened. Something has to happen here but our metrics nuts. I also didn't have metrics on how many new clients we would normally get from a newsletter like that because it was kind of just a content once we weren't tracking that directly, we were just kind of more indirect. And this one that day, we had a ridiculous spike in new people coming in who were leads coming in. So even though it was crap email, it worked really well. And my thought was, okay, this is very interesting. And it's it's intriguing because we started joking, like, should we do spelling errors on everything? So what I did is I wrote a blog post. I'm not I don't write very often because I just get bored after a while. But I was like, I have to write this like this needs to be from me as a here's what I did. Here's where I messed up. But here's the numbers that we got. And so I did one blog post. The next week, we the next newsletter came around, I basically made that entire newsletter, about that blog post that I wrote, and the subject line is snippet and all that kind of stuff. Were very specific to last week. We've locked up. And this week I'm fixing it. Like the whole thing was like, Don't worry, we double check this one bad grammar. One guy called me out blue, you didn't put this combo in the right spot like Screw you, I hate comments. Send it out all this stuff. This email didn't do as well as the other one, but still did it ridiculously high, ridiculously high open rate and click rate in comparison, and a bunch of people sent over an email saying that like, Oh, this was great. The numbers you guys got were amazing. This is a real cool like fine. So it's basically an unwanted test that I did. And kind of what I wanted to get into this is

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when you mess something up, if you can remind your consumer that you're human like they're buying from person, you can really connect with them and they actually appreciate that much more. They don't want to buy from a business they want to buy from a person what I did is I made a personal connection with all those people by explained by sending out that follow up email with that blog post it explained. Hi, my name is Andrew and I function up so Whoa, I sent all that out. And I've made a personal touch with those people to tell them like, Hey, I'm human, and unfortunately, it happens. And it worked amazingly, I'm not telling you in your next email go make a ton of typos. However, if you do, or you do mess something up, it always helps to personalize it and admit that you were wrong. Say you were human. And unfortunately, things happen. People love that and they respond so much more when they know that they're speaking to a person and not a business. So of course, today's featured tool is Grammarly. It will check your spelling mistakes and any grammar issues you have on wherever you're typing on the internet. So that's all I have for today. I wanted to share my story is very interesting. I thought y'all could learn something from it. So thank you rate review, subscribe, shoot me an email marketing interruption@bluetuskr.com I will see you all tomorrow.