We F***ed Up: The Story of an email to a (partially) rogue list

I got 6 emails last evening asking “why did you send this to me”? A couple of them stating SPAM regulations, and others taking it as a personal attack.

I’m sorry.

I Get it. I hate Spam too.

In fact, I own an Inbound agency and we tell clients all the time that we won’t send messages for them that are unsolicited. Everything we do at my firm is done to create value and leave individuals in a better place than when we found them (or emailed them).

I started my inbound agency over 11 years ago and we’ve been helping clients with their websites, marketing, email, social media, and even conversational marketing as of late. Heck, we were even making Myspace pages for companies way back when.

So let’s talk about what happened.

Strategy First

We’ve been working on a conversational marketing campaign, which included this email sequence and identifying the individuals in our database that would be great opportunity to get our conversational marketing webinar in front of.

We built out a list

We pulled our master “viable” list — this list has criteria that “prevents” us from sending to people who didn’t ask for it.

Criteria includes:

• All contacts with an email address (we only ever email people who we know or have raised their hands) #inboundagency
• Excluding ALL people who haven’t engaged with our organization in the past 6 months
• Excluding ALL people who have unsubscribed (this is automatic)
• Excluding anyone in a list that included everyone who has been BCC’d into our system and not engaged elsewhere in marketing (ie: filled out a form or subscribed to communication)

Remember that last bullet point in a moment

We sent 1 email

We sent out the email to that list at 4:30 on a Friday.

After dinner that night I checked the results of the email, 82 people unsubscribed, I then checked my email and I had half a dozen emails asking to be unsubscribed / wondering how they were added in.

One would say you sent this to 9,281 people and 6 had a problem. That’s not bad. — It was to me.

As an owner, I’m not one to shift blame — I’m the captain of the ship, I am in fact the one that told my staff which list to target.

I immediately jumped into HubSpot (our marketing and sales platform) and was puzzled because I personally set up the criteria for the exclusionary list months ago that would enable our systems to never send an email to someone who did not want it.

Turns out, sometime in the last 6 months (The last time we sent a widely sent email) that Hubspot changed their “criteria”/source data for contacts that were bcc’d into our system. Likely this happened during their changes for GDPR.

😳 — We F**ked up.

In looking at the list criteria, and the contacts that received it — the image above (top left) was set so that we never sent an email that wasn’t asked for (or opted into), the image on the right is the “new criteria” HubSpot uses for a BCC’d contact — Criteria changed, our list stopped updating.

So how we’re fixing this.

The screenshot above already shows the fix. But it uncovered a bigger issue:

Technology, AI, and machine learning is only as good as the inputs we provide. As technology and platforms expand we need to have processes and SOP’s in place to check the “human side” as we do, but we also need to make sure that we check the technology side too.

So Problem found.

Now What?

One thing I hate about an email mistake — which happens sometimes…

I refuse to send another email to apologize to the people who got the email wrongly — that’s only compounding the problem.

But I’ve written this to share with them if they do reach out.

Humans make mistakes sometimes. We’re human after all.

Own it. Fix it. And Keep Moving.

Where did we go as a society to always assume the worst in people and companies? We need to have compassion when on the receiving end of a mistake that it’s not done on purpose.