How to Send an Apology Email

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In January, an email from Park City Mountain Resort landed in my inbox. The subject line?: “It’s going to be an exciting week in Park City.”

And when I opened the email, here’s what I saw:

I cringed — not because the mistake here was so terrible, but because I’ve made many, many mistakes like this before.

If you send enough email, you’re going to make mistakes. Sometimes, there’s a typo in an email, or a broken link, or placeholder text that doesn’t get replaced, or you send an email at the wrong time, or you include a subject line that you later wish you hadn’t written.

But unlike a post on a website or social media, there’s no way to undo an email. Once you’ve hit send, you can’t take it back. And to make things even more complicated: Often, the person in charge of email is sending multiple emails every day, on deadline, to large audiences. Sending email can be weirdly stressful.

The good news is: There are strategies you can implement to prevent many common email errors. And if you do make a mistake, there are ways to make things right with your audience.

Build your pre-send checklist

The next time you’re on a plane, you might hear a pilot mention that they’re going through their final safety checks before they can take off. What your pilot is doing is going through an actual checklist, putting pen to paper as they make sure all of the instruments and parts of the plane are ready before they leave the gate. If they’re low on fuel or if a latch won’t close, that’s an easy thing to fix on the ground — but an impossible thing to fix in the air. So on every flight, no matter how experienced the pilot is, they’ll go through those pre-flight checks. No plane goes into the sky without them.

If you’re sending email, you’ll also want to put together your own version of this: The pre-send checklist. Nothing should go out until you’ve gone through that checklist.

Before you hit send:

• Check the Big Three — A reader’s going to see three things before they open your email: The sent-from name, the subject line, and the preheader text. I like to think of these as the Big Three, because they’re three things that might inspire a reader to open your email. Many of the biggest errors happen here, and for a reason you might not expect: When you’re building an email template, you might insert placeholder text into those slots. Case in point: On that Park City email, the preheader text read, “With events like Exciting Events, the possibilities for fun are as endless as our terrain.” A check there would have reminded them to swap out “Exciting Events” for an actual event.

• Check your intended audience — It’s rare to send an email out to your entire email audience. Most likely, you’re sending to a specific list, like your daily newsletter list, or a specific segment of your audience. Make sure that you’ve selected the correct audience before you hit send. (A common mistake: You copied a previous campaign and edited that, but your email service provider copied over the previous audience with it. So double-check the audience before sending.)

• Check the timing of your email — Most email platforms will give you two options before you send: Do you want to send right away, or at a time in the future? Make sure you’ve chosen the right option. And if you’re scheduling an email for later, make sure you’re sending at the right time of day. You never think you’ll be the one to mix up AM and PM until it happens to you.

• Check your links — Nearly every ESP offers a link checking tool. Use it to go through your email, link by link, and make sure you’ve linked to the right places and that there are no broken links. If there are any specific UTMs or tracking links that are supposed to be used, check for those, too. You may want to test out the links, too, by sending a test email and trying the links on both a desktop and mobile device. Once, I worked with a newsroom, and we didn’t discover that there was an issue with their checkout form until dozens of readers emailed us to say that the page wouldn’t load on their phones. It happens — but it’s something that an extra check would have caught.

• Check your grammar — Whether your email’s a few sentences or a few thousand words long, make sure someone else has edited it. If you’re part of a small team or working solo, your editor might be a friend or a spouse, or maybe you run everything through a tool like Grammarly before you insert the final text into the email. I also like to read each sentence of the email aloud. I often catch small mistakes this way that I might miss if I quickly skimmed the copy.

• Check for accessibility — There’s a long list of things that you can do to make your emails easy to read for any type of user. Some users may be color blind, so make sure you don’t have any difficult-to-read color contrast with text and background colors. Make sure you’ve added alt text to all of your images so a subscriber can see what’s happening if images are turned off or if they have a screen reader. And make sure your fonts are large enough to be readable.

• Check the mobile version — More than half of your audience is going to read your email on their phone or tablet, so before you hit send, always send a test email to yourself, and then look at that test on your phone. Are the fonts right? Are any images blurry? Did the email correctly resize from the desktop version to mobile? Your ESP may have a mobile-friendly view built in, or for larger organizations, you may want to use a tool like Litmus or Email on Acid, which lets you see how your email looks in dozens of different email clients.

What happens when you make a minor mistake?

When I started at The New Yorker, I remember running into an issue: On major holidays, our team still wanted to send out our daily newsletter, but we didn’t have the editing or staffing to put together a newsletter on those days. The solution: We put together a special holiday send of the daily, where a handful of writers would recommend feature stories they liked. We could get the copy written and schedule the email well in advance, so it worked well for our team.

But one year, I made a mistake: I was finishing the newsletter on a Friday afternoon before a long holiday weekend, and I accidentally typed in it’s instead of its. The copy editors caught the error, but I forgot to fix the typo before scheduling.

Worse: The error came in a paragraph that was originally written by a senior editor of the magazine.

When I got back to the office after the holiday, we had dozens of emails from readers, many of whom said, with no exaggeration, that they weren’t sure if they could trust a newsroom that could make such a mistake. Some threatened to cancel their subscription. I was at The New Yorker through a few controversial moments, but I never personally saw our audience as angry and upset as they were after my typo.

It was a small mistake, but for some of our readers, it was a significant one. We decided not to send a correction out to the full list — plenty of readers missed the mistake or never opened the email, and it felt odd to call attention to a typo — but I did work with our team to craft an apology email, and sent it every reader who’d written back.

Minor email mistakes like this happen all the time. Imagine that your organization is hosting a webinar, and you send an email to your readers about the event. The email says it’ll start at 12 p.m. Eastern time, but the webinar is actually at 12 p.m. Pacific time. In that case, “Correction” might be a good subject line for a follow-up email about the proper time, and you’d include a few sentences correcting the error. Sure, you made a mistake in your first message, but it was a fairly innocent oversight.

Here’s a great example of this from The Colorado Sun, which included a broken link in their daily email. They followed up with a note to readers with the subject line “Corrected link,” and then this copy:

Here’s one from Hatch, a direct-to-consumer brand which makes products to help people sleep better. A few days before Daylight Savings Time began in March, they sent an email to customers with tips on how to get more out of the time change — but accidentally told users that their clocks would move back instead of forwards. The next day, they started their apology newsletter with a very on-brand subject line — “Whoops, we need a nap” — and then email apologizing for the error. The tone of the apology matched the seriousness of the error.

And here’s one more, from Isaac Saul of Tangle. When he accidentally sent out a draft version of his newsletter to readers, he followed up with this note to readers, and then included the final, edited version of the email to the audience.

This sort of transparency goes a long way with your audience. If you make a minor mistake, correct it quickly, and make sure you do it in your own voice. This apology shouldn’t sound like it was written by a lawyer — it should sound like you.

The power of email is the personal connection that it builds, and that should extend to apologies. There are people on both sides of the screen.

What happens when you make a big mistake?

So those are a few examples of how to handle a minor mistake. But what should you do when the mistake is a major one?

In January, Oakland University, a public university just outside of Detroit, emailed 5,500 incoming students, and told them that they’d won a massive scholarship. As Eduardo Medina of The New York Times wrote:

Carnell Poindexter looked at the subject line of the email — “Congratulations!” — and opened it immediately while in a debate class at his high school in West Bloomfield, Mich.

Mr. Poindexter, an 18-year-old senior with a 3.8 grade point average, thought that perhaps this was the scholarship he had hoped for from Oakland University.

“You worked hard and it paid off!” read the Jan. 4 email, informing him that he had won a $48,000 academic scholarship over four years. Mr. Poindexter, who wants to be a lawyer, and his parents were elated.

But then, more than two hours later, came another email with a subject line that read, “CORRECTION.”

When you make a major mistake, your apology email needs to come from a person. (Their name should be the name that you see before you open the email.) The subject line should be personal and sincere. (These students were owed a bit more than “CORRECTION.”) The email needs to explain what went wrong, and it needs to offer a heartfelt apology — in the first sentence, and then again later in the message. It needs to explain how you plan on righting this wrong. And it needs to include personal contact information for someone in your organization so that those affected can get in touch with an actual person if they so choose.

Remember: Email is a 1-to-1 channel. It doesn’t matter if you’re sending a hundred emails or 100,000 — if you make a mistake, you’re making a mistake to each and every one of the people who received that message. Hopefully, you won’t make a major mistake, thanks to your pre-send email checklist. But when you make a mistake, own it, and do your best to make things right.

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