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Email invite + no site = bad plan

I know we agreed we wouldn’t use this as a whinary, but I think there is a lesson in this story somewhere.

One of my clients has a posse of agencies working on their business. None of the agencies have been identified as the lead - but one of us is always the current favorite. We essentially rotate and I suspect that over the course of a year we get pretty even billing.

Over the last few days a series of bad decisions have been made. My team has not been involved. We are passive, frustrated observers. We cannot do anything about any of it.

A new site was to launch on April 1st. This was a complete re-do, new content, new address, etc. Not surprisingly, the launch was delayed a week – but the old site was still taken down on March 31. If you went to the site, you got a “Coming April 8” page. Not an approach I would recommend, but not the end of the world.

Early the morning of April 8th an email was sent to all the subscribers inviting them to visit the new site.

When they got there, the site still said “Coming April 8th”. Uh oh.

Late on April 8th the new site went live. But it hadn’t been QA’d. (This is where I would have been fired.)

At about noon on April 9th the site came back down and “Coming April 8th” went back up. It’s 3:30pm on April 10th and the site is still coming April 8th. (We would have been close to losing the business.)

Aside from the double standard applied to my big agency verses the specialty agencies… how in 2009 could this happen? We are not talking about semi-pros. Everyone involved is in the big leagues. You don’t have to be a web expert to know that you don’t invite people to a store that isn’t open yet.

Imagine this:
Hey, NY fashionista, TopShop opens tomorrow.
Oops, I meant in a few days.
Well, really, we aren’t sure when we’re going to open, but keep checking back, okay?

© 2009 Work Life Balance.