As happens every Tuesday, the Magill Report was blasted into mailboxes all over the Internet. This Tuesday was extra special for some recipients, though. These recipients received a dozen or more copies of the newsletter.
Ken knows best practices and implements them rigidly in regards to his sending. He’s one of the very few standalone publishers that uses confirmed opt-in, for instance. But even with the best practices in place, sometimes bad stuff happens. From what little I’ve seen, this looks like some bit of software fell over somewhere.
In this case, there isn’t a lot to do. Sure, people are talking about it, but I don’t think anyone is treating this as anything other than an aberration or a software glitch. Ken doesn’t need to send out an apology and I suspect that he’s not lost a single subscriber due to this. People are willing to cut a sender a break when they have a long history of sending. I do expect we’ll see something about this in next week’s newsletter, possibly concluding with him looking for a new ESP.
Sending failures happen all too frequently. Some are embarrassing, some cause significant business problems. The biggest issues are when a send goes to addresses that shouldn’t be mailed, either unsubscribes, or bounces or inactives. These kinds of mistakes can drive blocks at ISPs and get the sender noticed by some blocklists.
The good news is that if it’s truly a one-off, then delivery may not be affected at all. And in cases where delivery is affected, problems tend to disappear quickly. Filters adjust and don’t take too much notice of a very short term aberration when there is a long term history of wanted email.
Mistakes happen
M
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I got a dozen copies of Ken’s missive, too. We’ll surely snark a little, but stuff happens. We all asked for Ken’s messages, perhaps just not quite so many many many many of them.
Yesterday was not fun. My tech guys say the glitch was fixed, though I do not understand the explanation.
I am very nervous about my next send.
There was one pleasant surprise, though. I had confirmed for me that the permission-based email marketing community is a very cool, understanding group.
I got A LOT of feedback, but only three negative messages and one unsubscribe.
I’m not that surprised that you didn’t get much negative feedback. You have a history and an email savvy audience.
I was a little befuddled by one email person who mentioned that “all 26 copies went into my inbox” as if this was some sort of surprise. I’m not surprised all that mail went to the inbox as there are many reasons it would (engagement, whitelisting, history, etc).
Glad it was fixed! But I can understand being nervous next week. Maybe send in batches?
My vendor is doing some sending on their own to test before I send again.
Still nervous. I don’t know if I can send in small batches. Good idea, though. I will check.
Layoff the Beefeater that early, Ken. 😉