When marketing automation goes wrong… it can go very, very wrong.
KFC has discovered one of the more challenging aspects of marketing automation. Whether via text messaging or email or dynamic content on a web site - automation doesn’t care what your content looks like or who it offends. It simply, blindly follows your instructions to automate. Pull the content match up with seemingly relevant data and bingo! Everyone gets a message at scale. It’s one of those places in marketing where fear can grip you in a head lock because you’ve just offended 30 million people - in a one on one basis - in real-time.
If you want to know if your data is dirty or clean or if your automation rules have been carelessly put together, turn it on, say a prayer and hope for the best. And if you want to play it safe - audit your data, your input sources, your images, content, data standards and business automations. And be sure and have a disaster recovery in place - not for your IT infrastructure, no a disaster recovery plan for your brand and your customer relationships.
Here are just a few of the stories from those recently expressing opinions on the KFC “whoops!”