Let’s face it. We all have a bad day every now and then. Especially now more than ever working from home can lead to some insanity driving crossovers between your personal and professional life. Picture this: You’re trying to write copy for that hyped up product launch, with a dog that wouldn’t stop barking, a baby who wouldn’t stop wailing and a kitchen that refuses to get in order. Before you know it, you’ve spilled the boiling milk over or the dog has knocked over the keyboard, or you’re simply too distracted and the result is a glaring gaff! Typos, wrong email recipients, missing subject line, wrong custom fields left as codes, you name it. There’s a hundred ways to go wrong about an email and make those dreaded email marketing mistakes.
And yet not all’s lost. An email mistake doesn’t have to cost you your job or your sleep! It happens to the best of us. And the best part is, even if you do happen to mess up, you can more than redeem your brand with some clever or humorous damage control followup.
So, how do you Olivia Pope your way out of a situation when you or your boss think that the mistake truly calls for a follow up tail-between-the-legs email? We hit upon 10 such “apology” or recovery emails that came on the heels of an email disaster and saved the day, and then some. Don’t forget to get inspired! And dare we say, some of these might even be worth intentionally making a mistake for.
1. “LOL, WTF was that?” Of course the funniest oops email ever from Drizzly
Gotta love a recovery email that’s loaded with such humour you almost wonder if the goofup was the best thing to happen to them!
2. Smashbox hits the spot with this oops email after sending a wrong promo code in their previous email
Way to turn a negative into a positive! Extra brownie points for sending it quickly after the first email.
3. Sometimes, even email academies get it wrong. But who better than them to know how to make it better?
4. An oops email so cute you might want to make it a part of your email marketing strategy.
5. Yes, spamming inboxes is a cardinal email marketing sin but Bodyshop redeemed themselves from it pretty quickly with this humble, mistake-admitting followup
The irony of making up for too many emails with another..email though.
6. Natural dog company gets it right, after getting it wrong
Gotta love a punny email!
7. A great example of using humour and creativity to make up after sending an email with the wrong recipient name in an email
Also, one must observe how pet products companies have the best sense of humour. Dogs truly bring out the best in you, eh?
8. Not all oops emails have to be funny. This one from Greenpeace is genuine and warm
9. Yet again, a hilarious apology email from a pet product company
“The dogs say the cats did, the cats say the dogs did it and the fish ain’t talking! As such (we the humans) will take the blame and apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused you.” I mean this is as good as recovery emails go.
10. This one from Hootsuite does a clean job of setting the record straight
Left a custom code field as it is? Happens to be one of the most common email mistakes! Hootsuite, the king of content, did well to rectify the mistake with some good copy.
11. HBO and the classic intern email goofup
We updated this post just to add this now-famous HBO email goofup. In June this year, HBO Max’s 44 million subscribers received a strange email with a subject line “Integration Test Email #1″ with the body containing only a line reading that “this template is used by integration tests only.” Soon, the internet was flooded with posts and jokes about the mysterious email which had caught everyone’s attention and some suspected it might be a marketing stunt for an upcoming show.
But the company soon owned up and in part meme-style pinned all the blame on the intern.
We mistakenly sent out an empty test email to a portion of our HBO Max mailing list this evening. We apologize for the inconvenience, and as the jokes pile in, yes, it was the intern. No, really. And we’re helping them through it. ❤️
— HBOMaxHelp (@HBOMaxHelp) June 18, 2021
So you can take solace in the fact that even multi-billion giants like HBO can slip up every now and then! Hope now you have not only found some good inspiration for how to make up for an email snafu, and realising that there’s no mistake bad enough that a little well-timed humour and creativity can’t fix.
Still scared of making grave email mistakes and would rather let experts handle it (and take the blame should something go wrong?) Book a free call with us. We have an enviable track record of almost error-free mistakes (Take that 6 sigma!) thanks to our manic quality control standards, attention to details, and double and triple checking every email before it hits ‘send’.
