Email marketing is a great way to stay top-of-mind with your current customers, past customers, leads, etc. These are individuals that want to hear what you have to say, however you must continue to add value or else they will unsubscribe from your list. Many businesses have considered email marketing platforms, but still tend to send email from an internal source such as Outlook. There are many reasons that businesses should be using a 3rd party platform such as Mailchimp, but today I am going to show an example of just one.
These examples are from a beverage distributor in Western PA. They would send regular messages about events and products. I have been a subscriber for several years and they were very consistent in sending emails and from what I can tell, had a decent subscriber list, that is until the other day. They sent out an email as usual discussing an event, but this time a reply came from someone asking to be removed.
Instead of the reply going directly to the organization, it went to everyone on the list, yet the from address still showed the sender. So I thought this one instance was just a fluke, but indeed it wasn't. I started getting multiple emails as did everyone else. Some people started to get witty...but some people started to get frustrated.
That was just the beginning. Before the night's end there were over 40 emails, leaning more towards frustrated. Finally, 2 days later I received this email:
Bottom line is if they had been using a platform such as MailChimp or Constant Contact, they would not have this ordeal. There is no doubt that this occurrence hurt their email list health fairly significantly. Yes, the apology email was fine, but it could have been avoided.
