3 big marketing mistakes and how to fix them

Popular advice in social media is to “fail fast, try again and fail forward.” I take issue with this statement. First impressions count and if you’ve made a bad first impression, it’s very hard to correct that.

Some recent marketing mistakes brought this home to me. Here are 3 big marketing mistakes that you should avoid:

1. Broken links in emails.

Okay, so we’re all human and make mistakes. I get that. However, if you consistently send emails with broken links, what kind of impression does that make?

Fix:

Set up some test email accounts and send marketing emails to them BEFORE you send to your entire client list. Time to do this: 1 second.

2. Automated replies gone awry.

It’s great to automate what you can so you can spend your time doing more productive work. Sending an automated confirmation of a request is good and lets the person know their email was received. However, when you sign up for Meeting A and get an automated response confirming your attendance at Webinar X, confusion will reign. To add fuel to the fire, after Meeting A, I got an email thanking me for attending Webinar X.

Fix:

Set up some test accounts and check the entire communication and work flow. Does the request go to the right data base? Is the correct confirmation sent out? Once again, this takes all of 10 seconds to do.

3. Not honoring unsubscribe requests.

It’s bad enough to get unsolicited emails. I still can’t believe how many people think that just because I corresponded with you once about 10 years ago, it means that I want to receive your newsletters now. How much more aggravating is it to dutifully click “unsubscribe” and to still get emails?

It’s no excuse that it may take two weeks to be removed from the list. Come on, it’s all automated. How long can it really take to delete a record from a database? Milliseconds?

Fix:

Test your unsubscribe process. If it does take more than a few days to become unsubscribed, figure out how to make that work faster? If you’re in a large company, it may entail running data base updates more frequently.

All of these mistakes reflect poorly on you and your company. I would not want to do business with someone who is not willing to take a few moments to test these simple things. I feel that if you can’t be bothered to test this easy stuff, what do you do with your more complicated stuff.

What about you? What marketing mistakes have you seen?

Photo is courtesy of Opensourceway’s Flickr Photostream, under Creative Commons Licensing.