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A
Anonymous
April 17, 2013
Solved

Make me feel better / Share your mistakes

  • April 17, 2013
  • 20 replies
  • 2867 views
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?
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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. 

20 replies

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Cecile_Maindron
Cecile_Maindron
Level 10
April 17, 2013
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
Amber_Hobson
Amber_Hobson
Level 8
April 17, 2013
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!
Michelle_Tizian
Michelle_Tizian
Level 10
April 17, 2013
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. 
Sherry_Hale
Sherry_Hale
Level 4
April 18, 2013
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.
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Anonymous
April 21, 2013
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.
A
Anonymous
April 24, 2013
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)
A
Anonymous
June 10, 2013
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!
A
Anonymous
June 10, 2013
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?
A
Anonymous
June 10, 2013
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.
Michelle_Tizian
Michelle_Tizian
Level 10
June 10, 2013
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. 
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