I ain’t necessarily proud of what I’m about to admit here.
But, it’s a cautionary tale of glorious irony that must be told.
Here’s the story:
Back in 2021 and for about 4 years prior, Stefania had been using one of the big, complicated, yet popular email platforms that is both an email broadcasting/autoresponder and shopping cart and everything else in between all rolled up into one.
And she had built a list of some 4,000 leads on there.
But, she noticed something “off” about her response.
She couldn’t quite put her finger on it.
But something in the milk definitely wasn’t clean (as she put it).
So she does some digging and finds out that, due to some weird glitch, out of those 4,000 leads only about 800 of them (only her customer list, basically) were mailed when she did any kind of broadcast. Plus, this was even after they increased her fees after hitting a certain subscriber count threshold, and while also making her pay a premium for features she didn’t want or use.
And, yet, even then they couldn’t even do the ONE task she needed.
i.e., sending emails to her main 4,000 person email list.
They were only being sent to her 800 person customer list.
So she complains to their support.
Their answer:
Basically crickets.
Or it might as well have been.
They had zero solutions for her.
Finally, fed up, she seeks my her king & master’s counsel on the matter.
“Ooh Mr. elBenbo,” she says in desperation, handkerchief in hand, drying her eyes… “whatevah shall I deeeeeewww???”
My solution:
I told her to get on the email platform I’d been using at the time (this was before we launched BerserkerMail). They’d always been good to me. And I had been with them for nearly 20 years at that point. Plus, their customer support was definitely light years ahead of the all-in-one platform she was using.
So the next day she obeys my command.
And to help her kick things off with a bang I even write the first email for her.
I was on a walk at the time when I got the idea for it. And I tapped it out right there on my phone. It was one of those emails with a 100% true, yet also 100% provocative, subject line about her “Concubine Business” — which was one of the side businesses she had.
I figured it’d be amusing for her readers.
And it was.
At least, to the 800 or so who had been hearing from her for the past 3 years.
The other 3,200?
Many totally forgot who she was from not hearing from her for so long, had no clue what the hell she was talking about in my “clever” email, and then proceeded to tap that filthy spam button like it was a sport! In fact, the first day alone she got well over 100 spam complaints. And while they tapered off over the next few days, she ended up with close to 300 spam complaints.
“Ah crap,” I said.
“What???”
“I should have had you send a more plain vanilla broadcast, with an opt out link at the top, and some copy right under that encouraging them to use it if they didn’t remember who you were, along with sending them in small batches of 25 emails or so over a few days, and not blast them all at once…”
Doh.
“But don’t you worry your pretty little head off,” I assured her. “I’ve used the platform you are using for many years. They’ve interviewed me for their podcast, and I am at least somewhat known over there. They have always been quite reasonable. Just let ‘em know what happened.”
So Stefania did just that:
She sent their support a long, sincere support ticket telling them what happened. To which their support responded not to worry, they logged it, and would make a note so she wouldn’t get in any trouble.
And that was that.
Or, so we thought.
Because a month or so later:
She logged in and… was locked out.
Yes, even though that platform that I assured her — and that I vouched for — was reasonable and wouldn’t do her dirty… decided to not only cancel her account… but they didn’t even tell her they did it.
When she inquired, saying what their support told her, they said:
Hi Stefanie,
When the decision was made to close the account, I did take into consideration the information you provided to us. Those details though ultimately did not change the problems I saw and I did have to move forward with the account closure. There were far too many complaints for us to allow any further sending.
This is a permanent closure and we will can not accept any appeals or allow new accounts in the future.
And so it was.
Obviously, she (well, me, in this case) is not blameless.
And now that I co-own an email platform, I get why they did it, and don’t even necessarily blame them for their decision. They have to protect their platform and users. And Stefania’s email got so many spam complaints, I don’t think they really had a choice.
Which brings me to the point:
We will never know for sure.
But if nothing else, this makes a good cautionary tale for anyone using email.
I hope you caught all the lessons.
If you want to learn more about Email Players go here:
Ben Settle
