Make me feel better / Share your mistakes

[Anonymous]

To err is human. I just sent every French person in my database a newsletter in Dutch. So I'm a bit agast at my first real mistake in years. I once sent something wrong to 100,000 people, but that was 4 years ago. This one stings.

So share with me. Make me feel better. What have you done?

[Michelle_Tizian]

How about this, I activated a trigger campaign but I forgot to add that if they converted or request a trial only, at a particular time frame, then send them a welcome letter and login instructions.  So one lead from Germany got the 2 letters above and sent an angry email saying that he declined and wasn't interested in receiving our publications a few months ago.  There were a few others who received the unintended email but only one complained.  Ugh and our data associate wanted me to explain why this happened. 

[Anonymous]

Bah, Friday + Monday does not equal a weekend. hahaha

I download my entire database as a backup once a month. I have a reoccuring appointment every 15th of the month to remind me to do a complete export.

[Anonymous]

Good timing Adam!  That's what weekends were made for ;0)  I export all of our Marketo records each month to help mitigate inadvertent corruption like that, but the export takes hours and we have less than 100K records.  Do you export your records? 

In the Best Practice to Backup Marketo Lead Database discussion over a year ago, Jep indicates the only way to do this is to export, but due to the slow performance, you should only export 40K records at a time.  I would think that Marketo would have there a quicker/better way to get a backup on their roadmap at least.  Does anyone know?

[Anonymous]

On Friday I wasn't paying attention and updated 3600 lead source details with an Industry. As you know, there's no undo. So for the past 2 days I've been individually looking up each lead who was changed, seeing what their lead source detail was, and seeing if any other people had the same detail and changing them all at once. It's probably taken me a full working day to fix this mistake. EEP!

[Anonymous]

At my old company, we sent out an email (salesy looking) and used the first name token. The list provided was incorrect and everyone got emails with the wrong first name!! (Luckily it was a pretty small list)

[Anonymous]

Reading these makes me feel SO much better - I'm glad to know other people have occasional "OH NO" moments.  I recently sent out an email reminder for a webinar that was supposed to be later that same day. Instead the reminder was for a webinar that took place 3 months prior! OOPS. On the upside, it proved that people DO read these emails since we were flooded with replies, some angry, some funny, including requests to be put in a time machine. I promptly sent out a correction and all was well. Not a huge disaster but reminded me once again to double and triple check all my flow steps. I also have a sign on my desk that says "Keep Calm and Re-Check Your Smart List" as a result of some other "OH NO" problems in the past.

[Sherry_Hale]

Mine isn't funny at all, but I get into trouble sometimes with cloning.  People registering for a webinar (webex event integration) were getting a confirmation email from an old webinar 3 months prior.  Embarassing and not easily fixed, but had to manually register everyone.

[Michelle_Tizian]

Ugh I have my share of butter fingers and my eyes not connecting with my brain. I sent a newsletter to a group of 4500 people, but I sent the previous month's version of the email. 

How about I sent an email with the wrong date after 3 people proof read it. 

I set up the wrong progression status for a promotional campaign.  What a mess. 

[Amber_Hobson]

I'm sure I can help make you feel better. Just last year, my first mistake in a really long time... I set up my campaign to go to a list of our clients with an email directing them to a landing page with a form. When someone submits the form, we have an internal email that starts with "Alert" in the subject line so that it can be easily recognized by our inside sales group. That email also prepopulates with some data from SFDC such as contact name, email and company.

So, when I sent the email out to about 25000 of our customers, I picked the alert email to go out instead of the promotional email! 

I guess the good news is that the alert email did generate quite a few people letting us know that contacts were no longer at their agency so we were able to clean up our database and add new contacts from them. However, to this day, I still check which email I am picking about 500 times before hitting that send button!

[Cecile_Maindron]

one of my French colleagues sent an email (in French) to US & UK leads. What was funny is that people answered saying "no hablo espanol" (!), tried to remember the French their took at school. I even get to learn a new expression "do I look Kermit to you?" 🙂

Cécile

[Anonymous]

Awesome stories! I feel compelled to air my dirty laundry but my stories are kind of lackluster. It is reassuring to know that everyone has felt that unsettling sting when you know you did something wrong. The funny thing is that, in most cases, we are the only ones who would notice within our organizations that something was wrong. We are a hypercritical bunch and I kind of like that. 

Obsessive compulsives unite!

[Anonymous]

I enjoy reading these postings makes me feel better that I am not in this alone.  I sent out just last week the same exact email to everyone again within a few days and was crushed that I missed the step to change the email to the new one.  Those who did not catch the first email did respond with inquiries to the second email.

[Anonymous]

Funny you should mention this, I messed up the logic in one of the send flows and sent 50,000 users a newsletter in Chinese for a product that they don't subscribe to...

The good news was that we actually got some sales enquiries from English speakers wanting to learn more about the product (thanks to google translate I suppose) and only 2 unsubscribes.

Maybe we should all send emails in the incorrect language more often, at least we'll geet some people's attention!

[Anonymous]

OK - I didn't want to admit this, but some of our leads were owned by "Marketo Synch" and were included in a promotional email blast, which wouldn't have been bad, but for that email, we decided to test having the email signed by the lead owner.  A few hours later I was surprised to receive a reply (since my email is associated with the Marketo Synch user that had the salutation "Hi Marketo".  The good news is that the lead was genuinely interested and converted to an Opportunity!  I quickly reassigned all the leads owned by Marketo Synch after that.

[Anonymous]

Best Bucket really cracked me up. Keep'm coming!

[Anonymous]

That makes me feel better Adam.  I feel like my nerves are shot from sending emails, feearing that something may be wrong in the email or in the smart list.  Im constantly checking and rechecking and somehow I still miss things but thankfully they are caught by others on my team before the email is sent out. I think I just need to slow down and take it one step at a time.  Im trying so hard not to let anyone down!!

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

We have an account in SFDC that we use to store 'hibernating' accounts that are unassigned. It's called "Bucket". When we first switched to Marketo, we sent an email to ~5000 people in 'the bucket' as part of a bigger email sent to everyone from their assigned lead owner. The emails all came from "Bucket" and were signed with "Best, Bucket". 

Another time, our product team decided to send out an email but set up the wrong links. I didn't test the links because 4 people had already been sent the test email and all signed off, stating they'd tested the links. Once we figured out the links were incorrect, I decided to write a redirect on our server to reroute the link instead of sending a correction email. I made a minor spelling mistake in the redirect and ended up taking down our entire public site for a half hour until I figured out what happened. We sent a correction email afterall. 

If you haven't taken down a site, sent a messed up email, or broken something then you probably haven't been doing this very long. 

[Amy_Lepre]

Adam, I feel your pain. I've been haunted by the "clone monster" a couple times - cloning an email and then not updating all of the links in the new email. The last one I did that on was a a highly anticipated and prominent new product release - the hero image/call to action linked to the previous new product we released. Within minutes I was getting instant messages, emails, and calls from within all levels of the company. Not fun. But definitely a product of being short staffed with too much on my plate - still no excuse. 🙂

We send out some sort of correction email whenever we goof. What did you decide to do in this instance?

[Anonymous]

Back in 1992 I was writing Oracle PL/SQL triggers to move the business logic from applications to the database.

I was slightly overtime when the CEO said he was going home and I should go too.
I asked if we could stay few minutes more, giving me time to write down the idea that just came to my mind.
Plain denial.

I had no recollection of my solution in the morning. I tried few different ways.
The first test caused an infinite recursive call, growing the database out of control, leading to a severe operating system crash.

It took me two days to rebuild a large server running Sun Solaris and Oracle.
Restoring huge backups added another day or two. 
Getting the lost idea working properly happened more than a week after the incident.

[Anonymous]

Adam, as the saying goes "there are those that have and those that will."  I had to stay up all night rebuilding an SQL database that I corrupted, but that was ages ago.

Just last month, another technology company that uses Marketo sent me and thousands of my US friends an email in Italian , but they quickly followed up with the following apology email with the subject " Our apologies - incorrect (Italian) email received".  The best part is they blamed it on their marketing tool - LOL! Not sure Marketo would appreciate that though ;0)

Please accept our sincere apologies if you have received an email from [xxxxxx] in Italian today, this was in error.

We always endeavour to ensure our email marketing is well segmented, with appropriate content for the region and contact it is intended for. Unfortunately, today a technical glitch in one of our email marketing tools has meant a communication has reached an audience it was not intended for.

We are working to resolve this issue and will ensure that this does not occur again in future.

Once again, many apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

Kind regards