Earlier this week our company sent out its first email blast ever! I would like to say it went smoothly, but that would be a lie...
For over a year now the Director of Marketing and I have been working with a local design and marketing boutique firm to design a complete overhaul of our company website. I remember looking at the website 4 years ago before my job interview and thinking, “Oh my!” (and not in a good way). Needless to say, this project was long overdue and I was very excited to be a part of the process.
After putting in more hours than I thought were possible for one project, my boss and I were pleased with the outcome. The site was posted on a trial run basis for about a month before the actual announcement was made. This means that not everyone saw the new website when they visited our URL but more times than not, it was there.
One of our Partners took this gracing period as an opportunity to inform everyone at the company that the new website was coming. He asked everyone to take a look and give us any feedback they felt was necessary. We had a couple of comments here and there but nothing major. After a few weeks of the overall review and some minor adjustments we were ready to make the big launch! The same company that helped design the announcement also created our email blast. We provided them with an email list of all our clients as well as email addresses for all our employees. The email was set to go out around 10 am on Tuesday morning.
About 9:33am my inbox went into overload. For almost 30 minutes straight I received “Out of Office” replies. My inbox was FULL! Both my boss and I are unsure why our design firm decided to have the email blast come from my email account but by that point it was a little too late. In addition to all of the “out of office” emails, I also received a variety of other responses ranging anywhere from a simple “Who are you?” (that was a good self esteem booster) to “Immediately remove me from your mailing list” - - “I did not ask for this information - - under the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 this is considered unsolicited e-mail.” (He obviously missed the “unsubscribe” button at the bottom.) Eventually I got a “Thank you” and then I received a “Thank you. It’s a very nice website. [And by the way, one of the projects you’re showcasing has all the wrong pictures posted with it.]” Awesome.
Shortly after I was able to sort through all of these emails I realized that I never received the email myself. I asked some of my co-workers if they had received it and they said no. A short phone call to the company we worked with and a phone call to our IT department determined that our spam blocker blocked the entire email blast to everyone in our company. Fantastic.
After many more phone calls back and forth with the IT department and the design folks, the emails were sent out again to all employees around 1:15pm. I was out to lunch trying to relax after a morning of putting out small fires. Little did I know what I was going to come back to.
To start out, as you all know from my last posting we just recently joined Twitter. At the bottom of the email blast it tells people to follow us on Twitter. Turns out, Twitter is blocked in our headquarters. (My boss and I do not work in our headquarters therefore we did not realize this. We assumed that if we had access in a branch office, they did in the headquarters as well. We were wrong.) Next I had a handful of people who assumed the email came to them blank because they never clicked “show images” in their email. (This of course makes me wonder how many of our clients had this same issue.) And of course lets not forget the 20 or so emails I received regarding errors on our website (ie: there’s a job posting missing, you’re using the wrong photos for this project (yes, it was the same one our client pointed out to us), you need to change this photo (not the same one the client pointed out to us), you should add this project, and my favorite - we’re missing a partner on our leadership page).
Even though things did not go as smoothly as I had anticipated, this was a good learning opportunity for me. Since this was the first email blast I was part of, I now know what to expect in the future. Besides having an inbox full of “out of office” replies, I can now expect people to not be as excited about our new announcement as we are (insert CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 guy.) It was also a gentle(?) reminder that even though you may put your blood, sweat and tears into a project it does not mean it is perfect. (Although that would be nice.) The good news is we did get one “Your new website is Great!” which made me feel better. Now onto the next project…
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