In this OpsCast episode, host Jessica Meyers interviews Mike Rizzo, founder of the MoPros community and veteran marketing operations professional. Mike recounts a pivotal "MOOP" (marketing ops oops) that occurred early in his career while using HubSpot to send a post‑webinar follow‑up email. He had cloned a pre‑built email, inadvertently linking recipients to an outdated webinar from a year prior. After sending the email, he discovered the mistake, attempted to correct it, but inadvertently sent the wrong link again. To remediate without spamming another correction email, Mike implemented a temporary 301 redirect from the old URL to the new webinar, later reverting it after six months. The incident prompted him to formalize a process: instituting peer testing of emails, creating a checklist, documenting steps, and emphasizing team communication. He shares broader advice for marketing and RevOps professionals—manage stress, lean on teammates, use redirects as a quick fix, and always maintain robust processes even as a solo operator. The conversation blends personal anecdotes, practical technical solutions, and operational best‑practice recommendations.
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Hi, I'm Michael Hartman. I'm Naomi Liu. And I'm Mike Rizzo. And this is OpsCast, a podcast for marketing ops pros and rev ops pros created by the MoPros, the number one community for marketing operations professionals.
Tune in to each episode as we chat with real professionals to help elevate you in your marketing operations career. So Mike, you want to start by telling us Uh, who you are, a little bit about you, like where you work and how long you've been in marketing and RevOps.
Yeah. So my name is Mike Rizzo. I am the founder of MoPros, the community for marketing operations professionals. I'm also working on a stealth mode product right now. So I'm pretty excited about that. Um, I have been in marketing operations for over 10 years now. I would say somewhere closer to 15, maybe.
Nice. Uh, one of the originals, it seems like.
Yeah. At least, you know, I go pretty far back. We're talking like, you know, Act-On. I did the Act-On thing. I did the Pardot before it was a part of Salesforce thing.
Did you ever work in Silverpop?
I never did. I never worked in Silverpop. But I wanted to.
So knowing that we're going to be talking about key MOOPs in your career, when in your career did the MOOPs that you're going to chat with me about today happen?
This MOOP happened earlier in my career. I would say it probably happened 3 or 4 years in. Though I'm sure there were others that happened prior to that and have certainly happened after, but this particular one happened about 3 or 4 years into my career.
Nice. So you were a seasoned pro at that point. Yeah.
Well, in marketing operations, we definitely feel like we're seasoned after just a couple of years.
Somewhere like along the peak of the Dunning-Kruger graph of like, I know everything.
Right. At least, at least I feel like I know everything.
Just getting straight into it and going to start with the hard-hitting stuff right away. What were you trying to do?
So I was preparing what was an email campaign. Now that I think about it, it was an email campaign specifically to registered members from a webinar. So we had done a webinar like any other marketing ops person. We were then taking the registrants list and then doing the follow-up email. I think I was parsing out like who attended versus who didn't and changing some language and all that stuff, but just trying to get that, that follow-up email out the door.
And knowing that you worked in some contemporary systems and some dinosaurs, what system were you working in at the time?
At that time, we were actually still using HubSpot. I had started my, my first startup gig and we were using HubSpot as the platform. We were integrated to Salesforce as well.
Was the webinar provider at all involved or is this totally irrelevant of the webinar provider?
This happens to be not related to the webinar provider at the time. Webinar provider integrations into any map was still pretty pretty rare and definitely clunky. Um, and so I didn't trust it. But hey, maybe the moves wouldn't happen.
So, so what was the actual moves?
Yeah, so, um, I think this has happened to everybody. The, the thing that happened was we, we got the email organized. I was parsing out who attended and who didn't, and then, um, I hit send on the email And I also got the email because like any good marketing operations person, you list yourself as both, both, you know, all the types of people if you can. And the link was to the old email. And the reason that happened was because I had cloned an email that was already prebuilt. You know, we're all looking to save time. And yeah, so I realized that I was literally sending someone to a webinar from like a year ago. And yeah, that was not right.
Oops.
Yeah.
Oops. So you kind of answered my next question, which is going to be who noticed it, but did anyone else notice it at the same time as you since you sent yourself a test email or how did that kind of play out?
Yeah, so, um, like, the, the whole thing was actually all, all self-fulfilling. Um, I, I caught the mistake. Um, and what I ended up doing is, you know, reaching out to my management team and I said, hey, we accidentally sent out the wrong link. Um, We, of course, is me. But I'm gonna go ahead and fix it, and I'll send out the corrected link like any, any good, you know, email would do. And I went ahead and I hit send. I don't know if it was me this time or if it was HubSpot, but I definitely sent the wrong link again.
Oh no.
And I was like, oops, like super, super loud. And I was home. I happened to be working from home that day. And my wife was like, what happened? It's like, I just sent the wrong link in a follow-up email to an email with the wrong link. So it wasn't just one oops, it was a double oops. Which is why I was really excited to get this program off the ground. Yeah, so I can laugh about it now, obviously.
Yikes. Yeah, it was terrible. I think I've seen a couple of those where the follow-up, like the oopsie daisies email, is also an oopsie daisy. And it's just like kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Yes.
Where it just keeps spiraling and then you keep getting panicked and you're like, oh no.
Yeah, and it's made so much worse when you're the one noticing it. Right. Like, like no one's really even bringing it to your attention. You just know you did the wrong thing. It's like how you're just like beating yourself up about it. It's the worst.
So what beyond send yourself the email? What else did you learn by making the same mistake twice in a row?
Yeah, well, a couple of things. One is to always create a process to have other people test your emails, right? Even if you make a mistake, it'd be good to have someone check the follow-up email. Um, and, and I actually ended up hacking a solution in this case. I was lucky. Um, as I mentioned previously, the link was going to a pretty outdated webinar. Um, and so I put on the marketing ops hat and I said like, how do you solve this problem without sending another, yet another email? And I went ahead and, um, did a 301 redirect and just rerouted all the traffic going to the old URL to the new one. And then about 6 months later, I went and like fixed the redirect to let them go back to their old destination in the like strange event that somebody saved an email for like a year and wanted to go to that thing. So, you know, I was able to remedy that situation, but through that kind of remediation process, I, I went ahead and actually documented this whole experience and then figured out like what were going to be the steps that we needed to execute in order to like send a campaign moving forward. Um, we were a pretty lean and mean team at the startup that I was at at the time, and you know, it's just me and a couple of other folks. Like our team was like 3 marketers, and really the other 2 were Not— they're focused on demand gen activities, right? And then the other one was writing content. So they're not exactly testers by trade, but creating a process for us to follow and then explaining why that was so critical for us to follow moving forward and kind of falling on my sword was exactly what I ended up doing.
I was going to ask about redirects because I've definitely had to put the emergency redirect in place. Not, not zero times in my career, either myself or somebody. I had one a couple of weeks ago where a marketer came to me and they built our— we built our pages in Unbounce at PatientPop. And we sent an email out that was linking to the previous name of the webinar. It was like the back part of the URL. And they said, oh no, no, it's been an hour. Why has nobody registered for my webinar?
Oh yeah.
So there is the quick, like, that link doesn't work. Like, do we send an oops email or do we just domain redirect real fast? And we went with the latter and Things were pretty smooth. So yeah, it's a good trick.
Yeah, it's a good hack to keep in your back pocket and always think about like, how do you solve for this? If you— if it's not an important URL that you're going to, then just temporarily redirect it. You'll be fine. Yep.
So it sounds like you put a huge process in place, at least at that company, in that role, on that team. Have you made the same mistake?
Yeah, I'm pretty sure I sent the wrong link out in Slack the other day. And I sent another email the other day. Yeah, I, you know, being a team of one for running all the things in the MoPros community right now, I'm definitely making lots of mistakes. And I am not following my processes at all. But I'm moving pretty fast. And I'm hoping that people will just forgive me. Also, you know, it's just fodder for more episodes. It's really I'll just come and share all the mistakes. Unfortunately, none of those will have outcomes and learnings, like confessing.
That's a whole nother series, just the confessional booth.
Yeah, exactly.
What would you say to the inevitable someone similar who has made the same mistake recently?
I would say just, it's not the end of the world. Definitely blood pressure goes up, right? Heart palpitations happen. You might start having some cold sweats, but that's all normal. However, if you need to step away for a moment, I would recommend that, or sit down or stand up, whatever makes you feel good. And just like lean on your team, especially if there's anybody around you that you can say, hey, I made a mistake, I need to figure this out, I need to talk through this. I think that's really, really important. Had I have had a chance to like talk through what I had just made the mistake, um, you know, with, uh, on that email campaign, then I, I might not have sent the wrong link again. I probably would have like verbalized that I— this button was incorrectly linked and I would have found it. So at a bare minimum, just try to reach out to folks. Everybody understands it's not the end of the world. Um, do what you can to remediate it and then move forward. Shake it off because you're inevitably going to make another oops.
So beyond that, what other advice do you have for other marketing and RevOps professionals?
I'm going to shamelessly plug to just watch the rest of these MOOPS episodes and learn from other people. But I mean, truthfully, it's like create good process. I think process is like a 4-letter word at a lot of companies, but in marketing operations, like it's like operational best practices to have good process in place. And even if you're a team of one, Mike, You need to try to follow a process, create a checklist. If it's on a whiteboard physically or if it's on, you know, a project management system, just do what you can, create a process, make it your own too. Like, you know, you can look for inspiration, but everybody's company and all the different steps that you take to get something out the door is different. And so definitely think about which teams will be impacted and just create a good process.
I've said a couple of times to people, the act of like making the checklist specifically has helped me not make the same mistake so many times of like, okay, I'm adding that thing to my checklist or whatever. I think super helpful.
Yeah, for sure. Awesome.
Well, thanks, Mike. Excited to have you on for your next MOOPs. I'm not.
