On Thursday 28th May, I made a major blunder – I sent out 3,602 emails by mistake.
If you got one of them, please accept my profuse apologies.
But the results were enlightening and they reinforced my belief that the great majority of people are good, kind and considerate. So much so that I thought I would share some details with you.
Let’s start with what actually happened and why.
Our Email Strategy
Throughout the 14-year history of Education Quizzes, I have been extremely reluctant to send frequent emails to our customers.
“Email marketing” is a ploy used by many businesses and Education Quizzes receives innumerable emails that, quite frankly, we don’t want. One of my daily jobs is to go through unwanted emails and clear them from my inbox.
I really don’t want to be considered a nuisance to any of our customers, so we have never adopted email marketing in any serious way.
However…
We are constantly trying to develop new ways to help children learn. During the last few months we have introduced new quizzes, Safe AI, Traffic Lights and Quizmaster.
Our website is now very large – more than 5,000 pages – so if we merely leave subscribers to hunt through the website, new things might be missed and subscribers might not get full value from their subscriptions.
In addition, we are keen to ensure that children make the most of the opportunities afforded by Artificial Intelligence. We want to keep parents and teachers informed about AI and suggest ways they might use it safely and sensibly.
And on top of that, I thought it might be nice now and again to let customers have a peek behind the scenes at Education Quizzes, so they understand why we do things.
For all these reasons, I decided a few weeks ago that we would experiment with a sequence of eight “onboarding emails” for new customers and once-weekly emails for everyone else.
I resolved that I would always try to choose subjects that are useful, insightful or enjoyable.
Your Email Safeguard
So what if subscribers find my emails annoying, or quite simply too boring to bother about?
Every one of the emails will always include an unsubscribe button near the bottom of the page. Click it and I will respect that immediately.
Without this safeguard in place, I would never have agreed to the whole thing.
Here’s What Went Wrong Last Week
If I sent out emails one by one to each of our customers, it would take at least a minute to send each one – even with the use of copy and paste.
That would mean that my entire working week, and then some, would be taken up with emailing. Clearly that is not a good idea in this technological age, so I use what is known as a CRM – Customer Relationship Management – programme called Mailchimp.
One of the really useful features of Mailchimp is that it can identify customers who have not opened my emails recently and avoid sending future emails to them. I figure that if people are not opening my emails, I certainly don’t want to clutter their inboxes.
Mailchimp is a wonderful tool if it is used properly.
Unfortunately, it is extremely embarrassing when it isn’t!
I was trying to tell the system not to send emails to people who were not engaging with the emails, but I pressed a few wrong buttons and instead sent more than 3,000 onboarding emails to customers who should not have had them.
Just to be clear, this was not a security issue. No personal data was exposed and nothing on customer accounts was affected. It was simply a very embarrassing mistake by me.
Five Minutes Later
I realised what I had done and I was mortified.
How could it be that a modern EdTech company could get wrong something as basic as an email send?
I bit the bullet and straight away sent an apologetic email to the recipients of the incorrect emails.
At this stage I realised that many of our treasured customers had now received two emails that they didn’t want or need.
It was 8:00pm and my world was falling apart.
I knew that correcting the error and responding to irate customer emails was going to be a big, big job in the morning.
A Sleepless Night
I slept very little.
At one point I even wondered whether I should send everyone another email to apologise for the earlier apologetic email – but then they would have had three completely useless emails from me!
I decided against that.
7:00am the Next Morning
It was with great trepidation that I hesitantly opened my inbox.
But what a wonderful surprise it was.
Only one of the 3,602 email recipients had filed an abuse complaint with their email provider.
Nineteen people had unsubscribed – and who could blame them?
But here is the truly heartwarming thing: eight people had emailed in to offer their support and to say that “it could happen to anyone”, or words to that effect.
Lesson Learned
I am truly blessed with a fabulous lot of forgiving customers.
To everyone who received the email by mistake, I am genuinely sorry.
To everyone who responded with patience, kindness or understanding, thank you so, so much.
And to everyone who continues to support Education Quizzes, please know that we never take that support for granted.
Lesson learned.
Very definitely learned.