Hi all, Kathie here. Today’s post is a little different from all of our other posts. In an effort to be more honest and transparent with our readers (because we love you guys!), we wanted to open up about a huge mistake we recently made and how you can help us out.
We share this with you all not to seek pity but to prove that we are also human and make mistakes just like everyone else.
We don’t always have this business ownership thing figured out and we hope you’ll feel a little
So…here it goes!
A Huge Business Mistake We Made + How You Can Help
We use the end of the year to do some spring cleaning and get our business organized before the new year begins.
A few of our tasks included updating blog posts’ graphics (we love Haute Stock!), updating content upgrades (sign up for our freebie library), and sending our year-end survey to our existing customers as well as our email subscribers.
It was a few days before the end of the year, I had a tired two-year-old who refused to nap, and even though I was exhausted, drained, and had an extremely long day I decided to do some work after we had put our son to the bed.
It was late and I really should have just gone to bed, but I kept telling myself, “just one more task, okay, one more.” I’m sure many of you can relate.
I hate going to bed with an unfinished task but who’s to-do list ever ends? I should have let things be, but alas, I kept working.
Long story short: in my exhausted state I completely (accidentally) deleted a large portion of our subscribers.
I was trying to permanently remove the hard bounce and people who had unsubscribed from our list but ended up removing all of the people who were happily subscribed.
And that was it. Poof! One refreshed screen – 9000 subscribers, gone (if you signed up to the newsletter pre-2017, this could well include you – you can get back on the newsletter list here if your inbox has seemed sadly missing of my web designer-y titbits and digital marketing nuggets).
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My heart sank. A lump in my throat formed. I wanted to cry but I was too tired to even shed a tear.
I sat there and let it sink in that I just deleted most of my email subscribers. People who want to hear from us. People who could potentially be future Bluchic customers. How could I let this happen?
Why did I feel the need to stay up late to do this task? It was in no way urgent. I could have done it any other day, but I can be so hard on myself that I feel the urge to keep going, going, and going until I’m completely exhausted and worn down.
Guilt for “not doing enough” kept me going and ended with me not focusing on the task at hand and deleting thousands of email subscribers.
Can you relate? I’m sure you can. Whether it’s society or our own inner critics, we all fall victim to keep pushing until we physically or mentally can’t.
What I feel absolutely horrible about is all of the email subscribers who truly enjoyed getting our email newsletters will now not be hearing from us because of this mistake. Of course, I mourned the loss of the number of email subscribers, but I hate the thought of people wanting to hear from us and they aren’t.
I contacted our email marketing provider immediately, but nothing can be done.
Oh no! @Bluchic shares a huge mistake they made in their business & how you can help them out in this postClick To TweetA huge lesson we’ve learned from this (huge) mistake is more rest, less hustle. We have to take care of ourselves as business owners. Clearly, if we don’t we’ll make bigger mistakes than if we just didn’t do the task in the first place.
After having a discussion with my business strategist, we decided that it’s best to be transparent and write a blog post about what happened.
I hope we can catch at least some of our subscribers by sharing this blog post in an effort to be encouraged to subscribe again, which you can do so by clicking the sharing buttons below.
Fortunately, we still have customer’s email addresses. But more important than building up our email list again, we are going to attempt to make some changes in our business so mistakes like this don’t happen in the future.
Change #1: Take care of our health
Change #2: Remember our priorities
Change #3: Try and not feel guilty
If you’d like to help us spread the word about signing up for our email list, we’d be forever grateful. Here are a few ways you can help:
1. You can pin this post to Pinterest (you can use the graphic at the beginning of this post)
2. You can send a tweet on Twitter using this easy click to tweet.
3. You can share this post on Facebook.
4. You can email your friends this post.
5. You can share on Instagram.
We love you all and we thank you so much for reading. We literally wouldn’t have a business without you!
