The power of "Oops!"

Did you ever send out an email campaign or a push notification and later realize that it was linking to the wrong landing page, or the copy had a grammar mistake, or had the wrong offer? Most likely the answer is yes.

We are all human and we all make mistakes, however the best way to go about it is to acknowledge the mistake and try to fix it. What works in normal life should work exactly the same way in marketing. You should acknowledge the mistake and apologize to the customers. Their reaction to the apology message might surprise you...

The first time we sent out an email containing an error, our initial reaction was to hope that only a few customers would notice the mistake, and decided not to send a corrected message so it won’t draw too much attention. We put a lot of checks in place to ensure that nothing like that will ever happen again. And for awhile it didn’t.

However in every marketer’s life there are always those days when the pressure to deliver revenue is very high, there’s 100 things that need to be done urgently...and somehow one email doesn’t get checked properly before it gets sent out. And that email links to the wrong landing page!

So next time that happened we made the decision to do things differently this time, acknowledge the mistake and send another message immediately apologizing to our customers and providing the correct link. The result took us by surprise! The open rate and click-through-rate for the apology email were almost double than the original email.

More checks were put in place, and more time passed by with flawless emails being sent out. And here comes that one day again, when this one message makes its way to our customers’ inboxes and has the wrong offer...

This time we were hesitant about sending yet again another apology...wondering what would our customers think? They might lose trust in us and stop buying our product. In the end we decided to take a chance and send out an apology message with the correct offer. And...surprise again! The open rate was significantly higher and the apology email had more clicks and purchases than the initial email.

This helped us understand that our customers are willing to forgive our mistakes and even grow fonder with us just because we showed our humanity and we are ready to face the consequences of our mistakes rather than trying to ignore them.

Next time, a push notification went out linking to the wrong page within the app. This time we didn’t hesitate and within 24 hours we sent out a corrected push with the right deep-link. Again the open rate of the “Oops, we’re sorry” push was significantly higher than the first push, roughly a 50% increase in open rate for the apology push versus the original push. The only change in the copy was adding: "Oops we're sorry! We sent the wrong link".

And even though we worked really hard to avoid mistakes, they do happen from time to time. And each time the customers opened the apology message, showing higher engagement than the initial email or push.

So instead of trying to ignore mistakes, use this opportunity to humanize your brand, and communicate with your customers in a sincere manner, acknowledge that you made a mistake and apologize. The customers will always appreciate your honesty and will engage with your brand even more than before.

There are however a few rules:

• Do not overdo it! This shouldn't be part of your strategy, sending the wrong link just so you can later apologize and increase engagement. Customers will soon realize that it's intentional and eventually start loosing interest in the frequent apologetic emails.

• Do not try to sugarcoat it, just be honest: "we made a mistake" and provide the correct information: "here is the correct link / offer / discount"

• Maybe throw in an incentive just to show you're really sorry :) this should increase engagement even more.

• Ideally the apology message should go out as soon as you realized you made a mistake, one hour later or at most 1 day later for maximum effectiveness. If more days pass by chances are they already forgot about the first email.

Good luck and I'm very curious to hear from other marketers' experiences so please feel free to comment and share your experience with apology messages.