Sent the wrong email to users 🤦
by Farid MovsumovI am sending weekly update emails every Friday to users about new cities and foods. I am not supposed to send an email if there is no new food or city. I have control for that in the code but this control code was wrong. I fixed it. But feeling really bad because I sent an empty template email without any new city or food. One user replied "Thanks, very informative"
😭and some users unsubscribed.
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I get super wound up about bulk email. It really digs at my soul.
So I try to remind myself of this: from your (emotional, incorrect) perspective, the magnitude of damage is 1email*num_users. But from each user's perspective, the damage is only 1email. And how many times have you received a wrong or low-value email, shrugged, deleted it, and moved on with your day? I know I don't even think about it when I receive one of those. In fact, I probably receive dozens per day. So although it seems like a huge deal when you're looking at all the emails at once, none of your users actually experience it like that. To them, it's just one more silly email that they move past in 2 seconds while filtering. Nobody is going to hold a grudge over this.
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Great sentiment and perspective!
I'll add to that a little bit. I've signed up for some e-mail content from sites that I thought were big/faceless entities. But then the e-mail contained errors and I realized "Oh, they're more like me than I realized" - and even better when I could reply and say "Hey, that link you just pushed is broken. You forgot to put http:// in front of it." :)
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That is relaxing. Thank you :)
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I wonder whether you tried to send an email explaining a glitch and apologizing for it?
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I was thinking about it but then I decided not to disturb people the second time. Also, I am not using any tool to send bulk emails and setting up infrastrucure for just one case is not a good idea I think
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