Gawsh - too many to mention. Though thankfully nothing disastrous.
One that sticks in my mind was when I emailed asking people to tell me their biggest problem and I'd do my very best to send them some tips and ideas that would help. This was when i was focused on marketing more generally and mailed a list of about 10,000. It took me over 2 days to reply to everyone :O I just hadn't counted on so many people replying - but a promise is a promise.
Sending out the wrong link happens every now and then (inevitably, every time you send a test email it's perfect, but the one time you don't...). But I've found people are almost always fine if you just send out an apology with the correct link. Obviously if you do it too many times it becomes painful for them but once in a blue moon doesn't hurt and it gives you the chance to make fun of your own hopelessness.
I've had other technical snafus that have needed firefighting. About 5 months ago Active Campaign messed up the link in an email we sent out to about 30,000 people via my wife's newsletter. The link worked but it ended up auto-filling a form with a corrupted first/last name which updated the contact record - I had to spend an age fixing hundreds of them by hand. Active Campaign still haven't figured out what the bug was yet.
Generally broadcast newsletters are pretty fire-resistant. When you start automating more then problems sneak in - sometimes completely unexpected ones.
For example I used to have a big autoresponder sequence with my some of my best marketing tips in it. One of those riffed on a quote from Bill Cosby. Obviously when events in the real world unfolded I had to jump pretty quickly to remove that.
Another time was when the pandemic started. I paused my autoresponder so that I could broadcast emails more relevant when everyone was locked down. But for some reason a couple of hundred people kept getting the automated emails. An inevitably out of the sequence of 300 or so, someone got an email advising them to boost their creativity by heading out and working from a coffee shop for a while. Needless to say that didn't go down well - so a bit of firefighting was needed to root out the reason people weren't paused and fix it.
But as I say, for a simple newsletter the main thing that goes wrong is the odd broken link which isn't really a disaster. And after it's happened a couple of times you tend to get fairly relaxed about just sending out an apology and a correction.
Oh wow, thanks a lot for such a thorough response. Good to hear nothing was terribly harmful and there was a solution for each scenario. Mistakes are unavoidable and handling them always brings valuable learning.
Hi Ian,
I'll shoot a learning question: what's the biggest fire you've ever had to extinguish (if any) since you started your newsletter?
Gawsh - too many to mention. Though thankfully nothing disastrous.
One that sticks in my mind was when I emailed asking people to tell me their biggest problem and I'd do my very best to send them some tips and ideas that would help. This was when i was focused on marketing more generally and mailed a list of about 10,000. It took me over 2 days to reply to everyone :O I just hadn't counted on so many people replying - but a promise is a promise.
Sending out the wrong link happens every now and then (inevitably, every time you send a test email it's perfect, but the one time you don't...). But I've found people are almost always fine if you just send out an apology with the correct link. Obviously if you do it too many times it becomes painful for them but once in a blue moon doesn't hurt and it gives you the chance to make fun of your own hopelessness.
I've had other technical snafus that have needed firefighting. About 5 months ago Active Campaign messed up the link in an email we sent out to about 30,000 people via my wife's newsletter. The link worked but it ended up auto-filling a form with a corrupted first/last name which updated the contact record - I had to spend an age fixing hundreds of them by hand. Active Campaign still haven't figured out what the bug was yet.
Generally broadcast newsletters are pretty fire-resistant. When you start automating more then problems sneak in - sometimes completely unexpected ones.
For example I used to have a big autoresponder sequence with my some of my best marketing tips in it. One of those riffed on a quote from Bill Cosby. Obviously when events in the real world unfolded I had to jump pretty quickly to remove that.
Another time was when the pandemic started. I paused my autoresponder so that I could broadcast emails more relevant when everyone was locked down. But for some reason a couple of hundred people kept getting the automated emails. An inevitably out of the sequence of 300 or so, someone got an email advising them to boost their creativity by heading out and working from a coffee shop for a while. Needless to say that didn't go down well - so a bit of firefighting was needed to root out the reason people weren't paused and fix it.
But as I say, for a simple newsletter the main thing that goes wrong is the odd broken link which isn't really a disaster. And after it's happened a couple of times you tend to get fairly relaxed about just sending out an apology and a correction.
Oh wow, thanks a lot for such a thorough response. Good to hear nothing was terribly harmful and there was a solution for each scenario. Mistakes are unavoidable and handling them always brings valuable learning.