Oopsy Hall of Fame: 2007 Inductees

This is the kind of fame that nobody wants, but highlighting the email marketing slips and gaffes by some of the world’s largest online retailers drives home the importance of being careful with your brand in a medium that’s high volume and lightning fast. This year’s inductees should be cautionary tales for everyone in the industry and a reminder that you need to be on your guard, temper speed with meticulousness, and be diligent with your pre-flight checklists. (Hopefully some of these oopsies will also make you feel better about some of the mistakes that you made last year.)

SUBJECT LINE SLIPS
Subject lines once again proved to be fertile ground for oopsies, which is unfortunate since they play such a strong role in determining whether the recipient goes on to open the email. Errors ranged from errant spaces to gibberish.

Musician's Friend, 1/11 — 2007-01-11_MF_Newsletter - SRC=3NL7AB
This was by far the most oopsy-fied subject line of the year.

CompUSA, 4/15 — NEW LG Monitors & Samung TVs Now Available
It’s awful when you misspell your own brand name, but it’s worse when you misspell someone else’s.

Target, 9/30 — Free Shipping on select.
Based on the content of this email, the subject line was supposed to say “Free shipping on select furniture.”

Cooking.com, 10/29 — Food For Thought: Food For Thought: Turkey, Gravy, Cranberry -- The Classics
Repeated newsletter name.

Neiman Marcus, 4/26 — FREE SHIPPING + Wide-Leg Denim: How to pull of this hot trend
Uses “of” instead of “off.”

CB2, 3/6 — wait til you see this chair
Crate & Barrel CB2 brand is not one for capitalization in their subject lines, but they should be spelling “till” correctly. The alternative spelling is “’til”—apostrophe-T-I-L.

Saks Fifth Avenue, 2/2 — Free Shipping: 3 More Days! + Our TOP 15 Valentine's Day Gfits
Transposition in spelling of “gifts.”

Diamond.com, 5/29 — Journey Diamond Jewelry! SAVE an Extra 20% + FREE Ship
In 2006 I also saw a few retailers offering a “free ship” in their subject line.

Avon, 6/26 — Get Award-Winning Results + FREE Ship on ANY eRepresentative Order
Avon also made the “free ship” error in this subject line—and then went on to do it 28 more times between July and November.

Errant spaces in subject lines were particularly in vogue in 2007. Here are just a few of the ones that appeared in inboxes:
Chadwick’s, 8/22 — Simply Irresistible...This Week: Best Summer Dress es Up to 70% OFF
Chadwick’s, 12/20 — Last Chance for Holiday Delivery! A Day Can Make All the D ifference!
Dick’s Sporting Goods, 5/21 — Celebrate Memorial Day – Extra 20% O FF in the Outlet
Gloss, 4/6 — NOON – 3 PM TODAY ONLY: FREE Gloss M akeup Bag + FREE Standard Shipping
Lands’ End, 3/9 — On “The View” today: The swimsuit th at makes you look 1 size smaller!
Lands’ End, 3/26 — New crops in flattering fits – now i n more styles and sizes than ever!
Lands’ End, 5/11 — New $14.50 sporty tees – Summer Ess entials start here!
Lands’ End, 6/18 — The women’s polos you love — from on ly $19.50
NFLshop, 5/2 — Draft Picks Are In – Order Your Jers eys
RadioShack, 9/30 — $50 Off Mio GPS – A RadioShack Exclu sive
RadioShack, 12/9 — TODAY ONLY! Get a FREE $20 RadioShac k Gift Card instantly with iPod nano® purc hase.
Sharper Image, 5/30 — Know what dad wants for Father’s Day ? We do.

DEPLOYMENT MISHAPS
Oopsies in the deployment sphere ranged from duplicate emails to empty emails.

MLB, 3/30 — Watch the Civil Rights Game LIVE on ESPN
The deployment oopsy crown goes to MLB for this email, which was completely blank.

MLB, 3/31 — Watch the Civil Rights Game LIVE on ESPN
MLB tried to rectify their mistake by resending the email. Unfortunately it was completely blank AGAIN!

Duplicate emails, usually sent minutes apart from each other, were sent by Brookstone, Lillian Vernon and Musician’s Friend last year. Circuit City also sent doubles of an email, but it was clearly part of an A/B test of subject lines that wasn’t split properly:
Circuit City, 4/29 — Get Mom what she really wants at Circuit City
Circuit City, 4/29 — Dream Deals! Perfect gifts for Mom!

Drs. Foster & Smith, 11/14 — Happy Thanksgiving
Drs. Foster & Smith got their scheduling mixed up and deployed this Thanksgiving greeting email a week earlier than they intended.



IMAGE & CODING ERRORS
Mistakes in coding and image formatting made for some of the most spectacular errors of 2007. There’s no missing these.

Apple, 2/1 — Apple eNews: February 01, 2007
Apple is our winner in this category with this email, which arrived like an iPod without its casing, with all its guts hanging out.



Apple, 2/2 — Apple eNews: February 01, 2007
Apple resent that email the next day and it rendered correctly—with the exception of some image text wrap problems where text runs behind the images. They had this problem in one of their newsletters in 2006 as well.



Rendering problems in Yahoo Mail Classic plagued a number of retailers. The crux of the problem is that if you didn’t use style tags in-line then the Yahoo Mail Classic user needed to turn off Yahoo Shortcuts, which is turned on by default. Otherwise, emails like this one from TigerDirect on Aug. 3 look like this:



For more on this issue see Alert: Rendering problem in Yahoo Mail Classic.

Bass Pro Shops, 6/26 — Save Big with Summer Bargains at Basspro.com
This email from Bass Pro Shops arrived with no images.



TigerDirect, 7/7 — Price Alert: Intel 3.33ghz Vista PC $239 (No Rebates)...Hurry
TigerDirect had a coding error that essentially wiped out the bottom portion of this email. Unfortunately what was wiped out included TigerDirect’s address and the unsubscribe information, so the error actually resulted in the email not being CAN-SPAM compliant.



Crutchfield, 3/28 — New Sony big-screens: larger-than-life HD
Crutchfield had a problem with their name personalization default. Instead of defaulting to “Electronics Fan” when there’s a null set, it displayed this techno-gibberish.



Circuit City, 1/25 — Hurry—sale ends soon at Circuit City
Just like they did in an email in 2006, Circuit City duplicated the main message image here.



Eddie Bauer, 11/14 — Free Shipping + see the all-new Gift Collection
It appears that there was an unintentional height limit placed on the navigation bar so that it rendered all squished.



HSN, 12/6 — Your Featured Products for the Week
HSN used the wrong source image for part of this email.



GRAMMAR & SPELLING MISTAKES
Sometimes it’s carelessness, but other times it’s ignorance. Using poor grammar and misspelling words make you look foolish and distracts from what you’re trying to say.

Home Depot, 12/6 — 25% Off Holiday Decor!
“Live Tree’s”???!!! Elementary school grammar teachers everywhere are writhing in pain. But clearly this was just a slip. More egregious is the regular misspelling of “100s,” “1,000s” and “TVs” that I see from some retailers who think these need an apostrophe-S to pluralize them. Here’s the rule if you don’t know it: Single numbers and letters are pluralized with an apostrophe-S, while strings of two or more letters or numbers are pluralized with a simple S. For example: “All these products earned A’s.” “We stock 100s of Blu-ray DVDs.”



SmartBargains, 12/19 — Last-minute gifts: extra 20% off + express delivery
Barnes & Noble, 12/19 — This Week -- Coupons, 46% Off Last-Minute Gifts, More
I want to give props to SmartBargains and Barnes & Noble because they are two of the few retailers who know how to properly use “last-minute” as an adjective—there’s a hyphen in there, folks. As a former magazine and newsletter editor, I really hate to see marketers embarrassing themselves with poor grammar. During December, Diamond.com, Coach, Kmart, Linens ’n Things, Crate & Barrel, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Old Navy, Montgomery Ward and Furniture.com all left the hyphen out when using “last-minute” as an adjective in a subject line. Needless to say, many other retailers have made the same mistake in their body copy as well.

TigerDirect, 5/21 — TV Blowout: 46" LCD HDTV $999...42" LCD HDTV $699...32" LCD HDTV $429...Hurry
Attention: I misspelled “Attention.”



ADVICE ON HOW TO AVOID & RESPOND TO OOPSIES
Mistakes are unavoidable, but you can put processes in place to minimize them and to respond appropriately when they occur. Some tips (updated 1/28 based on reader suggestions):

1. Develop a pre-flight checklist and follow it every time. Also check out the eec's collection of email checklists.
2. One word: Spell-check.
3. Check all the links in the email, especially key calls-to-action. I didn't include this oopsy above but it's quite prevalent and can severely degrade the effectiveness of an email.
4. View a test send in accounts from all the major email clients, or use a rendering tool to ensure consistent rendering across platforms.
5. Have someone else look over the email before it goes out. It's difficult to catch your own errors.
6. If you make a mistake in an image, simply correct the source file.
7. Don’t resend emails that contain minor mistakes. Only resend those where the mistake has significantly impaired the message.
8. If the error is significant, see if you can halt the send. You may be able to stop your entire list from receiving the erroneous email.
9. Develop a protocol for your apology emails so you can respond quickly when serious mistakes happen. For more on that, check out Reportlet: When and How to Say You're Sorry.
10. Consider holding brief post-deployment debriefings to review what went right and wrong during the email development and deployment.

To learn more from other people’s mistakes, check out Oopsy Hall of Fame: 2006 Inductees.