Sometimes marketers are just sloppy.

Take, for example, an email I received today from a company.

I wasn’t expecting it (sloppy #1).

I never consciously signed up for it (sloppy #2). Apparently I’d bought a package they sold through Appsumo and they claim I asked for future offers. If I did, I didn’t mean to.

The email itself used a template from the sender’s ESP, but whomever wrote the copy didn’t actually proof read it (sloppy #3).

Use this area to offer a short teaser of your email's content. Text here will show in the preview area of some email clients.

Clearly, no one actually took the time to proof the email or even send it to themselves. Otherwise, they would have noticed the teaser text wasn’t changed.

Sloppy email marketing is a major cause of delivery problems. In this case, the error was more user visible than machine visible. But if they failed to check the machine visible information as well, that can trigger bulk foldering.

For some mailers the bulk filtering isn’t that huge a problem. The major consumer ISPs track when users go into their bulk folder and pull email out. If that happens, that improves the reputation of the sender. In this case, though, the mail is unexpected, so the recipient isn’t going to look into the bulk folder to pull it to the inbox. And even if the recipient did look in the bulk folder, it’s unlikely they would recognize it and remove it to the inbox. The sender is new, the preview text is unedited and it doesn’t look like “real” mail.

None of what the sender did here is unrecoverable. It’s not a good introduction to recipients, but it’s mostly fixable. That’s assuming the majority of recipients didn’t unsubscribe or complain. If they did, the sender probably squandered a prime marketing opportunity simply by not taking enough time to proofread their copy.