The Challenge
This is a career piece from the vault! Years ago, I was leading the marketing ops for an educational company specializing in online courses. We were on track for a major product launch that we’d planned out with an 8-email sequence over 12 days.
Our target revenue goal was $320K. The audience size was 280K qualified prospects and we were supporting that launch with a first-day webinar promotion.
Things went fairly smoothly. The webinar slightly underperformed compared to our previous launch. But the close-day bookings were where we really needed to win.
And that’s where technical failures threw things into chaos.
The Crisis Unfolds
First off, this launch was happening immediately after Mercury went retrograde. It felt like we were always launching during retrograde, so I put all the extra measures into place that I could.
The name of the game is QA, QA, and QA some more.
But even with the attention to detail I put into the marketing ops plan, there are some things you can’t account for.
On the closing day of our launch, we ran into two critical issues:
Issue #1: Sales Page Failure Our sales page went down at midnight and remained offline for 7 hours on the last day of sales.
Issue #2: Email Platform Outage If that wasn’t bad enough, our email marketing platform had a data center outage. The email outage started almost immediately after we fixed the sales page. And right during the send of one of the closing day emails. Oof.
When I checked our send metrics, I discovered that email had only reached 57% of our intended audience (161K contacts instead of 280K).
This was devastating timing. Historical data showed that our first closing-day email usually generated $40K-$47K in revenue. Instead, we were tracking at only $19K.
Responding Quickly & Strategically
Immediate Assessment: You need to understand what you’re dealing with and the impact it will have on your launch. Especially when communicating with stakeholders about your recommended next steps.
The first thing I did was get in contact with our email marketing platform’s support team. We needed to make sure they were aware of the issue and see if they had updates on resolution.
Next was the quick analysis piece. I compared send volumes to those of previous successful launches. Then, I calculated that we were likely facing a $20K+ revenue hit from the email issue alone.
With an underperforming webinar at the start of launch, we already had to play catch-up.
Cross-Functional Coordination: Knowing the impacts, I was able to collaborate more effectively. I worked with our technical and sales teams to make sure we had options for recovery without hurting our list. This wasn’t just about sender reputation, but also about not overwhelming our audience. Product launch weeks can be intense for readers, too!
Strategic Solution: Rather than trying to resend the failed email, I recommended adding a third closing email to the campaign. This approach would:
- Ensure 100% of our list received at least two closing messages
- Provide an additional chance to purchase for anyone who missed the first email
- Maintain our sender reputation (and deliverability) by avoiding duplicate sends
Execution Under Pressure
With a timer on our emails ticking down to the end of launch, we had to work quickly. So we put together and deployed the new email within hours. As soon as our marketing platform team gave us the greenlight, we were ready to go with a message for dual purposes.
The email worked for both audiences – those who missed our earlier message and those who needed one final push to convert.
The team executed the rescue plan flawlessly under tight deadlines to create and ship new content immediately. All while ensuring smooth deployment and monitoring for other surprise issues.
Once you have one major platform issue, all others should be suspect too!
Results and Recovery
Immediate Impact: The recovery email generated $69K in revenue. This was 29% of our total campaign revenue and our highest-performing single email of the entire launch. It was also well above the average $40-47K that closing emails typically generated.
We still took a hit, but it wasn’t as bad as it could have been.
Final Results:
- Total revenue: $238K (74% of goal)
- Successfully maintained email deliverability metrics
- Preserved subscriber relationship despite technical challenges
After major launch issues like these, you can’t just stop with final results though. Process improvements have to happen.
What we did next: I led a comprehensive post-mortem analysis that resulted in:
- Enhanced monitoring protocols for critical send days. Contrary to popular belief, set it and forget it is not a good idea!
- Backup communication strategies for platform outages. Having a library of content to draw from made creating a third compelling email much easier than starting from scratch.
- Improved vendor SLA requirements for launch periods. We needed help from multiple vendors during this critical window, so we set special SLAs for launches.
Key Takeaways
Data-Driven Decision Making: Take the time to review the impacts, even if it’s back of the napkin math. It’s better to make an informed decision than run around with your hair on fire.
Cross-Functional Leadership: Clear communication is everything during a crisis. Frequent updates to stakeholders are so important. Plus, making sure you have the right players in the room to fix the issue at hand!
Customer-First Approach: This is key in my book. It’s so important to avoid the temptation to “spam your way out” of a technical failure. Protect your list!
Systematic Learning: Post-mortems are so beneficial for pulling out the key pieces needed to keep issues from cropping up. Even when the fires are external, there are always takeaways.
At the end of the day, we made up a lot of lost ground, but we didn’t hit that $320K goal.
Sometimes, you won’t hit the goal. Technical issues will always come up, especially with how many systems we tie together these days!
What I took away from this experience is that while technical failures are inevitable, what matters is how we respond when those fires come up. Execution of a campaign plan is only half the battle. Recovery from failure helps make great marketers.
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