Marketers’ Anxiety and the Send Button: There’s a Cure

To help marketing, growth, and engagement teams see their work from a new perspective, Braze has partnered with Tom Fishburne, CEO and founder of Marketoonist, for a 10-part series of marketing-themed comics.

Each week, we’ll share a Marketoon exploring a different aspect of the customer engagement landscape—and hear a thoughtful response from a Braze employee based on their own experiences and insights.

This week, CTO and Co-Founder Jon Hyman on technology as a cure for marketers’ anxiety.

Who hasn’t hit “send” on an email and then had second thoughts (or big regrets if you did an accidental “reply all”)? That’s why Google added the “undo” command in Gmail. As conscientious professionals, we develop the habit of carefully reading and then rereading our messages before sending. And we can probably count on our colleagues’ forgiveness if we slip up occasionally.

But when your job is about delivering flawless customer experiences and personal communication at scale, the stakes are much higher. One little misstep can hit hundreds of thousands of inboxes, creating a negative brand impression for those customers...and even getting your company some unwelcome press coverage.

Our cartoon friend’s situation here with the “super stinky” customer list is exaggerated for comic effect. Good customer engagement software is designed to avoid this sort of unhappy accident. At Braze, we do a lot of user testing and are continuously improving our platform experience based on feedback from our customers—our goal is to make it intuitive to do the right thing, and (extremely) difficult to do something as wrong as calling your customers “stinky” by mistake.

But there’s no question that we humans are error-prone, which is why hitting that “send” button on an email to millions of people can be nerve-wracking. Fortunately, there are numerous tools to assist in catching errors. Test sends are a great first step: By sending emails to yourself using random user profiles it’s possible to get a preview of what the personalized emails will look like. Features such as seed groups, which send all emails to an internally defined list, enable team members to see the message as soon as it goes out. If there is a problem, the campaign can be stopped, corrected, and restarted.

For campaigns that are not time sensitive, consider using speed-based rate limiting to deliver the campaign over a few hours to give you time to gauge customer reactions, or volume-based rate limiting to send to an initial percentage of one’s list before sending to everyone else. As email evolves, keep an eye on changing best practices, too.

There will probably always be a little anxiety around sending a big campaign, but, for most marketers, the right technology ecosystem is probably a better solution than medication. Ask your doctor if Braze is right for you!*

*This blog does not provide medical advice. It is intended for informational purposes only. It is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.