Are your automations causing this easy-to-miss email problem?

A couple of months ago, I canceled the contract with my German phone provider.

Don’t get me wrong, I was with them for years and was mostly a happy customer. The main reason why I changed my phone provider had to do with my needing a local, Portuguese number for some fun, bureaucratic stuff.

The cancellation process was easy and straightforward. 

The company had a quick “why are you cancelling your contract with us” questionnaire on their website, which I filled out. Following that, I got an automated email confirming the cancellation. 

Job well-done here, no notes.

But a day later, I got another email from them. I saw their sender’s name, and immediately thought, “Was there an issue with my cancellation request, or anything else that I need to know?”.

When I opened the email, my confusion turned into a massive eye roll.

It was a “refer a friend” automated email.

As a customer, I wasn't cancelling my contract angrily, so I brushed it off. But as an email consultant, I knew they'd f*cked up - I was just too busy that day to pay extra attention to it.

But I did pay attention two weeks later.

That’s when I got a second “refer a friend” automated email with the same incentives.

If you’ve never seen the behind-the-scenes of an Email Service Provider (ESP) before, here's what was going on:

My previous provider has an automation for customers who meet a certain condition, like: "has been a customer for 12+ months," or "lifetime value above [x]€." 

What they don’t have are exclusion triggers, conditions that remove a subscriber from an automation when something important is happening with their account.

Like, for example, having just cancelled their contract.

(Imagine what the response of a not-so-satisfied customer would have been like if they got two emails like that after cancelling their contract!)

Seems logical, right?

As consumers, we expect companies to “see” where we’re at in our customer journey with them and respond to it accordingly - whether it’s in our inboxes or outside of them.

More often than not, companies put such automations together, individually, because they know they need to have them in place… But they fail to think about how these automations interact with one another or behave under the same roof. That’s especially crucial when subscribers take actions that need to raise certain flags (it can be negative ones, like cancelling a membership or contacting customer experience with a complaint, or positive ones, like booking a sales call or placing a second order).

And that’s how brands lose trust with a tool that was sold to them as a “trust builder in your sleep”.

If you think this issue is only applicable to the B2C world, think again.

Welcome sequence, onboarding, sales call reminders - if you have any automations like that in place, they may be quietly widening the trust gap instead of closing it.

Want to close the trust gap in your email ecosystem, so that your email marketing can support your growth plans rather than stall them? Book a disco call with me here and let’s talk about how we can make it happen.