Mistakes in your own daily and personal life are annoying.
Mistakes in your business?
Way more annoying, not to mention typically more impactful and damaging.
Guess what I did this past week?
I made a mistake in my business.
I created a free internal resource for past coworkers who were interested in starting and building a small business.
It was an amazing opportunity, and I created a landing page explaining the resource, had an email sign up so they could receive it, and created a 3 email automation spread out over a week.
In the first few days I had 10 people sign up to go through the resource.
Amazing!
What I didn’t realize though…is that my Welcome Series was also triggered when they signed up for the resource.
The trigger for that automation is set for “any new subscriber.”
I was annoyed at first, since it meant double the emails for them, but then thought it would be okay…
Until I realized that all 10 sign ups didn’t engage with the Welcome Series, which had been set up to unsubscribe unengaged folks. (Quality subscribers over quantity…right!?)
So what happened?
While I was trying to welcome new folks into the business, I single-handedly kicked them out.
Sunday morning when I saw that the new emails were all inactive due to my Welcome Series, my whole mood and demeanor dropped.
I was frustrated, annoyed, and felt like all the hard work was a complete waste.
One of those, “Can’t I just catch a break!?”
However. When mistakes come up like this, it’s important that you don’t stay in this negative mindset for long.
It won’t help you get out of what’s happened, and it’s more damaging the longer you stay there.
→ I had to switch my mindset and focus to seeing what I could learn from this, and fixing the problem so that it wouldn’t happen again.
Oh, and I was praying a bunch that God would help me not be discouraged and upset over it all. (A key element to have and add in your daily life!)
Here’s what I did:
I turned off the Welcome Series.
I created a new Welcome Series that doesn’t kick out people, instead they’ll only get the free onboarding resources if they fill out the business status survey.
I’ll have to figure out in the coming weeks what to do with unengaged folks. (Will ask my mentor more about this.)
I re-activated the inactive accounts so that they can finish the free resource automation.
I’ll reach out to the affected emails at the end of this week to check in, apologize for the confusion, and let them know they’re free to unsubscribe at any time.
It’s a mess and unfortunate to go through, but it’s also fortunate that this happened very early on and before I had paying customers.
So! My encouragement is to not be too hard or down on yourself when mistakes come up in your life and business.
They happen.
I am obsessed with proofreading, editing, and testing all my systems before setting them live…and I still ran into this mistake.
Mistakes are going to happen.
It’s up to you to control your response to them and then to learn from them.
If I didn’t move quickly to repair and fix what was broken, I’d still be in a gloomy mood and definitely wouldn’t be sharing this email and its content with you.
Keep your head up and continue working hard!
Michael
PS. While I was fixing this mistake, I was also creating a new and exciting service for FP that I’ll share with you later this week!
→ Interested in trying out Beehiiv? I’ve got an invite link just for you! Get your first month free, and 20% off your first three months.