Is the damage done in revoking an e-offer worth it?

This morning, I received an email from FreshDirect as I always do. Except this one was different from the usual offers. Titled “Email sent in error,” it read:

Dear Anders,

Oops. We sent you an email and offer you should not have received earlier today. That email – titled “What's Good: Get $20 Free Food, Plus New Garlic & Lime Rotisserie Chicken.” – mentioned an offer which, alas, you are not eligible for. We would like to make up for our mistake by waiving the delivery fee on your next order (or adding an extra week to your DeliveryPass). Simply enter code FREEDEL74 when you checkout before February 15.

Our apologies,

The Customer Service Team at FreshDirect

Alas indeed. It was like the e-quivalent of getting un-invited from a party. Imagine opening your (physical) mailbox and fining a note reading “Oops, we didn’t mean to invite you to our wedding – but you can attend the brunch the next day!” It doesn’t happen often in the physical mail world, but accidents like this plague e-marketers all the time – and frustrate consumers. Someone mixes up a spreadsheet and then gets trigger-happy.

From a business perspective, too, FreshDirect’s offer is kind of ridiculous. Delivery costs about $6 – and you can get it waived anyway by running a 5 second Google search for coupons. But say you did get the $6 waived, and FreshDirect saved $14. Is that worth the damage to the company’s brand? Because even a tiny mistake like this leaves a sour taste in the customer’s mouth (and we can just add it to FreshDirect’s sorry display at “lunch” last week, where they served tiny bowls of microwaved food to students who’d been lining up for quite a while after receiving several reminders about this great FREE lunch offer). Customer loyalty is hard to earn, but extremely easy to lose – especially in a market with alternatives. And just because email marketing is easy (in that you can reach out to all your customers with personalized offers) doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be taken seriously.

So what should FreshDirect have done instead? Bitten the bullet and learned from its mistake, I think. Direct online marketing tries hard to build relationships with customers. Companies pay copywriters to write snappy, friendly text. They pay designers to create a clean, appealing image. To lose it all over $14 just doesn’t seem worth it.