Welcome to this week's Campaign Confessionals!

Let tell you about the time I sent an email to the wrong country 😂

I got a ticket to send an email promoting a webinar to all records in South Africa. The client in question used country codes in their country field and not the full country name.

Those of you who have been around the block a few times can see where this is going.

In my head, South Africa = SA and I proceed to build out my email, my audience and schedule that sucker without a single Google search to confirm my assumption.

You know what they says about assumptions but in this case, I was the only fool.

A few days later, the client pings me that something isn’t quite right with the webinar program. They had plenty of registrations but the wrong registrations and they wanted me to investigate.

You could feel the confusion oozing out of the ticket.

And what do I find when I pop up open the program? A hundred-something registrations from clearly Middle Eastern names in a campaign meant for South Africa.

Record scratch. Freeze frame. Light bulb slowly flickering on.

Yup, in the world of country codes, SA stands for Saudi Arabia. ZA is South Africa.

So much for my top-notch geography and Googling skills.

The delightful conclusion to this tale is that after I explained the error to the client, they weren’t that mad about. The region the stakeholder managed was the Middle East and Africa so they chalked up the high webinar registration rate to serendipity.

When it’s time to normalize your data, normalize with humans in mind first.

Yes, the whole point of normalization is for systems to better process and analyze data but us fallible humans will always be the ones having the final say (for now at least until our AI overlords take over.)

Using country codes for example will always be a painful choice because very few people actually know all the country codes and thus maintaining that country field will be Siphyean exercise.

The foundation of great marketing operations is built on doing the basic stuff really well. Make the choices that make the basic stuff as easy as possible.

See you next week (from the correct geographic location),

🫶🏽 Alysha