Downloading 1 of 23,688 messages
| February 12, 2010 | Posted by Ross under Random Fillings |
Sending an email…seems such a simple, quick and low cost thing to do. It’s easy to drop someone a note, and just as easy to mail 3 or 4 people that same message all at once. While you’re there, you could copy in a few more folk who might need to know and soon you’ve updated 10 people at the click of a button and taken for granted just how easy it is to communicate today compared with, say, just 15 years ago.
But when does an email update cross the line and become a bulk message, or a piece of mass comms that you might need some help with to make sure you do it properly?
That simple technology also makes it so easy to publicly and royally mess up on a grand scale too if you don’t 100% know what you are doing. Let me tell you a true story……
In a past client-side role in a past life I was in work one sunny day when I received a call from a third party we dealt with who was a bit miffed that we had sent him the same sales email 5 times. He’d just loaded up outlook and there they were so figured he’d phone and ask us to be more careful next time. Now, it wasn’t an email that had come from myself via our normal email broadcast service but turned out to be a direct email from one of our area managers. I apologised but thought nothing more of it….often the problem can exist somewhere between the keyboard and the chair in these circumstances.
Around an hour later I had a similar call from a different third party who had also received the email, followed by a call very shortly after that by yet another – these had received 7 or 8 copies of the email. This quickly escalated and the rest of the day became call and query handling about why we had sent the same email so many times….some people now getting over 40 copies of the email and by the end of the day someone had called to say he had over 70 copies that were downloading.
I went home.
The next morning I got in to find there was a bit more of a panic as the volume of complaints had increased by email and phone through the evening and the volume of duplicate emails had increased significantly too.
I called the area manager who had sent the email and asked for some information about what she had done exactly. She pointed me towards the store manager who had actually sent the email for her. He explained that he had sent a message about some new products we had launched to all of our intermediary contacts in the South West, around 600 recipients….using Outlook…..by copying & pasting all 600 or so addresses into the ‘To’ field.
*sigh*
I’d sent guidance out previously to the sales team about sending such emails to themselves and using bcc field for the recipients, but this guy wasn’t on the list, he was just helping someone else out and figured he knew what he was doing. Turns out that one of those recipients had a problem with their mail system and the high volume of visible recipients (because of the ‘To’ field being used) caused something to fall over and that recipient’s mail server fell into a loop and began to constantly start bouncing the email on to everyone that was in the ‘To’ field….all 600! This we found out a few days later after paying a lot of money for an email ‘forensics’ company to track down the root of the problem.
Later on during the first day when the volume began to hit 30 or more copies being received by everybody it turned out that someone hit ‘reply all’ and asked if anyone else was getting the problem? Well, this just sent another email to that bad mail server which started to spit copies of that out as well and send them on to everybody else, and a few people replied to that email with ‘reply all’ and soon there were 5 or 6 different emails all being resent constantly to all recipients.
Around mid morning on day 3 I took a call from a recipient who said we had blocked his email access and he couldn’t do any work. He was still on dial up; I asked him to load up his Outlook Express while I was on the phone:-
“What does the screen say?”
“It says…hang on….here we go…..downloading 1 of 23,688 messages. Every one that downloads so far is from you, the same message each time.”
“Gulp”
I have paraphrased a little there, but the number is genuine…..23,688 copies of our email in his account waiting to be downloaded.
A real mess….it took up the best part of two working weeks to clear everything up and thousands of pounds in fees to the email forensics company and some compensation to some of the recipients who had genuinely lost the ability to work for a few days. A few people even called for me to be sacked, assuming I’d sent the ‘campaign’…cheers for that.
Email marketing needs to be treated with some respect. There are some basic rules with engaging through email; you should always make sure the recipient list is genuinely expecting to receive comms from you because they signed up to your list within the last 2 years, you should never let anyone who receives the email see anyone else’s email address, you should always give them a simple way to opt out of receiving further emails and, most importantly, make sure you’re telling them something of true value.
Oh yeah, and make sure the person who presses ‘send’ knows what they are doing!
Using Outlook to send an ‘e-blast’ is fine if the recipient list is very small and made up of close B2B contacts, but anything else needs a proper email broadcast system to be used and a guiding hand from someone who has knowledge and experience. None of this should cost a fortune, but could certainly save you one!
In past lives, Secret Pie has provided email marketing services for businesses such as Nike, Wine Rack and Manchester United as well as current clients such as Silver Cross.
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