There are things I both love and hate about being a project manager on the interactive side of things. Unlike my project managing friends in the “traditional” side of the marketing, I don’t have set in stone delivery dates and the projects I work on never go press, so I can fix a typo or a wrong date quickly, easily and inexpensively. On the counter side of that, the projects I work on do not have set in stone delivery dates, and there’s the temptation to always tweak one more thing just because you can.
Email sends are the exception in the digital space, and quite frankly, they stress me out. When I'm doing them for a client I get a sinking feeling in my stomach before I hit send, and as the person responsible for hitting send on most of our agencies own marketing efforts, I get that moment of dread every time.
I’ve read about the rookie mistakes, simple things to avoid and what happens when you rush.
I know to test it, triple check my lists and proof, proof, proof.
I try not to get too upset when a typo gets through, even though it does happen from time to time. I’ve had a few near misses, such as wrong words that spell check replaced. I've had a few moments that only impacted our side, like forgetting to turn of the reply to and filling our President’s inbox with out of offices messages, but, thankfully, I’ve never had more than a typo get through on a final send.
Until this week when Mr. Murphy paid me a visit.
An event invitation went out to more than 1000 of our prospects and clients. I tested. It was proofread. I made sure the proper recipients were getting it from the proper people, and was sure to cross suppress to cut down on duplicates. I sent it, and felt good. I went out to lunch and came back to learn that our website had gone down. And, I after I yelled “HOW COULD YOU DO THIS TO ME????!!!” to our IT staff, I realized, they didn’t do it to me.
The old adage of Murphy's Law did it to me.
So, after I answered the barage of questions like, “Well, why did you send it if the site was down?" and “Did you test it before you sent it?” I drafted some Mea culpa language and added to the send. I took the phone calls and registered people manually, and I even had a few sympathetic clients say “Oh that’s happened to me!”
But, as I’ve told everyone on our team --I need that site to be up and running for 36 hours until I feel comfortable with the next send!
So if you've read this and want to know what I sent. I'm happy to report the site is live and you can learn more about our great event, click here. If that doesn’t work? Let me know below. I’m getting a thicker and tougher skin about it.