Uh oh, you just sent an email out with Hi {Name} as the salutation. Or even worse the names were there but they didn’t match up and Sally got an email that said ‘Hi Bob’.
This is one of the most common mistakes we see, yet one of the most avoidable, if only everyone took the time to thoroughly test their emails before they sent them out.
If it happens, it’s not the end of the world and you can do things to quickly rectify the mistake.
One example we found was this company who sent an email out with ‘Hi {SubscriberName}’ as the salutation. Oops. However they handled it really well – they quickly followed up with an email acknowledging the mistake, apologising that they forgot the subscribers name, and they started the follow-up email with this very apt subject line as follows:
Subject: Lyndsay, “To err is human, to forgive divine” – Alexander Pope
They then went on to pepper the subscribers name throughout the email, to drive the point home they do know your name and they know how to use it. Below is a screenshot of the intro of the follow-up email. Click on the below image to go through to the full email where you will see they went on to offer a big discount just to drive their apology home.
The thing is, these things happen, as emails are sent by humans not machines, so the best thing you can do is follow-up with an email acknowledging the mistake, apologise, perhaps add in a bit of humour or something light, throw in a discount or special offer, and most of the time your subscribers will forgive you.
If you would like more tips, check out this post for the top 5 tips for a great apology email here in our post on sending apology emails