In January, Oakland University, a public university just outside of Detroit, emailed 5,500 incoming students, and told them that they’d won a massive scholarship. As Eduardo Medina of the New York Times reported:
Carnell Poindexter looked at the subject line of the email — “Congratulations!” — and opened it immediately while in a debate class at his high school in West Bloomfield, Mich.If you send enough email, you’re going to make mistakes. Sometimes, there’s a typo in an email, or a broken link, or placeholder text that doesn’t get replaced, or you schedule an email out for the wrong time of day.
Mr. Poindexter, an 18-year-old senior with a 3.8 grade point average, thought that perhaps this was the scholarship he had hoped for from Oakland University. “You worked hard and it paid off!” read the Jan. 4 email, informing him that he had won a $48,000 academic scholarship over four years. Mr. Poindexter, who wants to be a lawyer, and his parents were elated.
But then, more than two hours later, came another email with a subject line that read, “CORRECTION.”
But as I thought more about this email error from Oakland University, I kept coming back to two things I wish they’d done — one before hitting send, one after:
1. Create a checklist of things to do before you hit send. What are the steps you need to take before sending out that email? A few suggestions: Make sure your sent-from name, subject line, and preheader text are correct. Make sure you’re sending to the right audience. (In 2021, Oakland University admitted 1,300 students to their freshman class — the idea of more than 5,000 students getting an email about a scholarship should have been a red flag.) If your E.S.P. offers a link checking tool, use it to make sure the links are correct. And make sure someone else has edited the email and signed off on it before you hit send.
2. If you truly screw up, apologize, and make it personal and sincere. Imagine that you’re hosting a webinar, and you send an email to your readers about the event. The email says it’ll start at 12 p.m. Eastern time, but the webinar is actually at 12 p.m. Pacific time. In that case, “Correction” might be a good subject line for a follow-up email about the proper time. Sure, you made a mistake in your first message, but it was a fairly innocent oversight.
But when you make a major mistake, as in the case of Oakland University, your apology email needs to come from a person. (Their name should be the name that you see before you open the email.) It needs to explain what went wrong, and it needs to offer a heartfelt apology — in the first sentence, and then again later in the message. It needs to explain how you plan on righting this wrong. And it needs to include personal contact information for your organization so that those affected can get in touch with an actual person if they so choose. Those students deserved much more than “CORRECTION.”
Remember: Email is a 1-to-1 channel. It doesn’t matter if you’re sending 100 emails or 100,000 — if you make a mistake, you’re making a mistake to each and every one of the people who received that message. Own your mistake and do your best to make it right.
