When to Resend an Email
You sent your email an hour ago, satisfied everything was hunky-dory. Then you get an email from the product department—the price for the featured bag is wrong. Or, in the case of some industries, like the airline industry, the prices have changed. We’ve all sent an email with mistakes at some time or another. Of course you can use spell-check and have the email proofread by a couple of people and significantly decrease the chance of sending an email with a mistake, but eventually it will happen.
So, what do you do? Do you send the correct version? How do you explain what was wrong with the first email? Do you draw attention to the mistake? Or do you let it slide…maybe your readers won’t notice. Well, it depends on the mistake.
- If it was just a spelling typo or grammatical error, don’t send the email again (just use Mustang List’s built-in spell-check feature next time). If the typo was on the price of something (or if you just made a mistake with the price), you should resend the email. If the incorrect price was too high, you could lose sales (not the point of the email, I’m sure). If the price was too low, you could lose money or, at best, you could have some customer service issues on your hands.
- If there is an incorrect link, whether to resend would depend on the importance of the link in the email. Is the link the main call to action, or a link among many? Is the link the focus or purpose of the email (like you sent an email about an online survey for your readers to fill-out but you gave out the wrong link)? Can your readers accomplish the desired task despite the link being wrong—are there other links to the same place in the email? If the email ends up meaningless and your readers will not be able do what you want them to do (i.e., there are no other links to the survey, or the hot deal you want them to check out) you need to resend with the correct link—just put a little note at the top of the email noting the correction of the error. Use humor when and where you can, but keep things concise; you don’t want to waste your readers’ time.
- If the malfunctioning link is the unsubscribe link, resend and explain the link in the new email works. The readers who want to unsubscribe need to be able to do so. Although it might seem a bit much to resend the whole email, the people who wanted to unsubscribe will be able to and those who weren’t planning on unsubscribing will be relatively unaffected.
- If your email contained the wrong date, you should resend—you might lose customers who decide they can’t go (and so don’t click the link) based on the date in the email; and you’ll confuse the ones who click and find the date on the website different from the one in the email. It’s worth clearing up this potential confusion.
- If you omitted or made an error in your From Name, you should resend if the error will prevent recipients from knowing who sent the email.
- If your error was that you sent the email to the wrong list or group of people, decide on the impact. If the email is going to be totally irrelevant to the recipients, or if it’s going to be confusing and elicit calls to your customer service line (i.e., you confirm attendance to a seminar or event to a group who hasn’t been invited to attend the event), you should resend the email. If it’s merely a matter of targeting to the wrong group, and the email won’t be completely irrelevant or meaningless, you can let it go—there’s no need to clear something up that wasn’t confusing in the first place.