Lands’ End’s “Oops” E-mail. Is There A Wrong Way To Fix An Error?
Written by Evan SchumanWhen Lands’ End sent out a 25-percent off E-mail promotion last week, there was a programming glitch that caused the page to simply not work. It happens. To rectify the situation, the apparel chain owned by Sears (NASDAQ:SHLD) sent a corrected version of the campaign out to shoppers, only this time the subject line said nothing more than “Oops. Here’s the working promotion.”
The message included no explanation about the non-working promotion, which caused no shortage of baffled shoppers. But was there a better way? On the one hand, had a shopper tried the earlier promotion and been frustrated, that subject line might very well prompt him or her to try again. And those already frustrated shoppers might have simply ignored a second message with the identical subject line. For recipients who had not noticed the earlier message, would the baffling message make them more or less inclined to open it? Customer service reps for Lands’ End said they were inundated with complaints about the first E-mail. But wouldn’t more of an explanation help assure shoppers that the link could be trusted?
-Marc
April 5th, 2013 at 7:38 am
Of course the second email should have had more explanation, but there are a number of additional steps they should have taken.
They should have performed some simple database segmentation, and only sent the ‘Oops’ email to those that had opened or clicked the previous one.
They should have used a 302 to redirect from the faulty page to a new one as soon as the problem was identified.
Not exactly rocket science…