What was your biggest email marketing mistake, and what did it teach you?

What a great prompt!

Not one I’m sharing easily, but the statue of limitations has expired so I think I’ll be okay. Plus, it’s a great lesson!

One time I deleted a path on a conditional split by accident, and this was way back before Klaviyo had the “undo” button. I was supposed to just switch off a “NO” path as we didn’t need the emails to be sent anymore, but in my never-ending quest to keep things tidy, I tried to completely remove it. Anxiety struck, and somehow I ended up deleting the “YES” path. 

Luckily, I had saved all of the individual email content as templates, and had the entire flow saved as a map (in Paint, of all places), so I was able to recover and quickly put everything back the way it was. Analytics were lost, but ultimately the customers kept receiving the intended emails, and the Sun rose the next day.

The lesson in there is to keep your content saved as templates (use the Klaviyo template library as much as you’re physically able), keep your flows mapped out somewhere (ideally on the cloud) and the maps updated regularly, and ask your manager (or client) what they meant if they said something vague (e.g. what did they mean by “We should treat this flow the way Anakin Skywalker treated the padawans upon turning to the dark side”).

I’ll be coming back to read everyone else’s stories, too!

1. In a general sense: expecting a single email to be enough to convince people to do something. Even if they signed up for and want what you’re advertising in that one email, it is still not enough. There are so many people that need just an extra email or two in order to convert. (I am not advocating for spamming people!!)
2. In a specific, Klaviyo-y way: One time I got a little too clever with Klaviyo flow logic and custom events and ended up with a recursive loop that was sending everyone the same email every 24 hours. 🤐

In early days I made a lot of mistakes. from the ones I remember, it was on a post purchase flow. I built it around the order placed trigger but never added a filter for ‘canceled order zero times since starting this flow’. So if someone canceled their order right after buying, they still got the whole post purchase sequence, review requests, cross sell emails etc for an order that no longer existed.

Nobody complained loudly, but it's an easy way to look sloppy to a customer. Now I add a cancellation filter to every purchase based flow by default, not as an afterthought 😀 but even in general now I map out the flow filters and lock those in first, before I even touch email content. If the filters aren't foolproof, the emails don't matter.

This is probably a little boring but… I think we’ve all made the AM/PM email scheduling time error, unfortunately.

The bright side is it turned into an interesting send time test!