Mini Cooper and their email oops

I haven’t been able to track down any information about what happened, but it seems MINI USA had a major oops in their email marketing recently. So much so that they’re sending out apologies by snail mail. Pictures of the apology package appeared on Reddit earlier this week, and include a chocolate rose, some duct tape and a SPAM can stress reliever.
It’s a great example of a win-back campaign that really focuses on the recipients rather than the sender.

  • They communicated with the folks who unsubscribed or blocked them outside of the email channel. When you’ve annoyed someone by sending them mail, sending them more mail doesn’t usually win them back.
  • They acknowledged that something went wrong and that they were really sorry for it.
  • Their letter included some humor in the letter they sent: “If you’re ever feeling annoyed again you can de-stress using this particularly squeezable can of spam”.
  • They set up a easy to get to, easy to type URL at http://www.miniusa.com/sorry/ to collect these signups, making it simple to go from the hard copy letter to the website.


Full text of the letter

Dear John,
Last week you received some emails from us. Hundreds of emails, in some cases. While we love staying in touch, this was unintentional. A server went haywire and the the technical glitch has been fixed, but we wanted to make up for any hassle we might have caused.
Nothing says “I’m sorry” quite like flowers and chocolate, so we’ve combined the two and enclosed a chocolate rose. But if you’re allergic to flowers (or chocolate), we hope this duct tape will help fix things up. Or, if you’re ever feeling annoyed again, you can de-stress using this particularly squeezable can of spam.
Again, our sincerest apologies for the inconvenience.
Motor on,
The MINI team.

Many companies have had major oops moments in email marketing. This is one of the more creative (and probably expensive) responses to that. It goes to show, though, how valuable email marketing is to MINIUSA. I have to wonder how many of these packages were sent out, did they target high value customers specifically? Or did the packages go to everyone who opted out from mail after the oops?

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This summer’s non-work project for me has been training for a 5K run with Fleet Feet in Menlo Park. As part of the training programs we get weekly emails from the store on Monday. As I was reading through today’s email, I found myself smiling and happy. Lisa, who is one of the store owners and writes the emails, is just so happy and bouncy and thrilled to share her love of running and that comes through in the newsletter.
Our group’s primary coach is the other store owner. During runs we often talk about random stuff, and when I tell people I do email delivery, they always start talking about their experience with email and spam. One night I was running with Jim, and we were talking about Jim’s experiences with sending email. He mentioned their ESP and talked about how convenient it was. But then he mentioned he wasn’t sure that they were sending enough mail (which made me laugh hard enough I almost tripped on a curb).
I realized I am not just a delivery expert when I started thinking about all the ways they could increase the amount of email they send, while still maintaining the quality and the friendly feel of their bulk emails. What could they offer local runners that would increase the value of the store to them? The first very obvious thing was a race calendar. There are dozens of local races every week, telling folks about upcoming races and entry deadlines would be a way to contact folks regularly without it always being a “buy stuff from us!!”
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In a number of cases they discovered that certain kinds of templates kept getting flagged as spam, even when Mailchimp was sure that the sender had permission and the recipients wanted the mail. They analyzed some of these false positives and identified some of the reasons that naive users may identify those particular emails as spam.
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