• by Jess Nelson , December 14, 2017

Doug Jones is the newly elected junior Senator from Alabama, thanks to a Democratic upset in a deep red state that Republican Donald Trump decisively won in 2016.

Democrats secured the victory even with an embarrassing email mistake by the Alabama Democratic Party (ADP). An estimated 180 Alabamians received emails from the ADP on Tuesday requesting they vote tomorrow, the day after the Special Election.

Nancy Worley, the Chairwoman of the ADP, admitted the mistake to the Montgomery Advertiser after copies of the emails began circulating on social media.

Worley clarified that the mistake was derived from an email deliverability error on Monday, when ADP employees sent out two emails to recruit voter turnout for the following day. 180 of those emails failed to deliver on Monday, a fact the ADP learned after their email automation platform MailChimp contacted them on Tuesday. MailChimp asked if the ADP wanted to resend those lost emails and, after a confirmation, did so Tuesday.

Worley asserts that the ADP knew exactly who received the incorrect email, and that those recipients all received a follow-up email as a correction 

Although this email mistake was minor in scale and did not cost the Democrats the election, it is a warning to all email marketers on the importance of checking the deliverability of their emails as soon as an email campaign is sent. If ADP employees had checked Monday after sending their email, they could have made the corrections then instead of sending a faulty email the following day.