In this OpsCast episode, host Justin Myers interviews Rachel Squire, Marketing Operations Manager at Tasktop Technologies. Rachel recounts an early‑career error while managing a Marketo campaign aimed at complying with upcoming Canadian anti‑spam regulations. She mistakenly set a smart list filter to ‘any’ instead of ‘all’, causing the entire database to receive an unsubscribe notice email. The mistake was discovered the next morning, leading to panic, internal scrutiny from the CEO, and a lack of an abort‑campaign feature to stop the send. Rachel’s remediation involved creating a secondary campaign to pull back recipients, manually removing affected contacts, and sending an apology email. She emphasizes the importance of owning up to mistakes immediately, transparent communication with stakeholders, and implementing robust QA processes: checking smart campaign limits against the full database, using checklists, and requiring peer verification for compliance‑related work. The conversation concludes with advice for professionals who make similar errors—admit the mistake, maintain confidence, and treat errors as learning opportunities.
Chapters
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.
Hey everyone, thanks for joining us for another episode of Moops TV. This episode is going to be hosted by me, Justin Myers, and joining us today I have Rachel Spire. So Rachel, I'd love for you to do some quick intros. I obviously said your name already, but who are you and where do you work?
I'm Rachel. I'm the marketing operations manager at Tasktop Technologies, and I've been working in— I've been here for about a year.
Awesome. So been at Tasktop for about a year, but what about how long have you been in the general marketing revenue ops I just finished year 6, so I've been doing it 3 companies, 6 years.
Nice.
Veteran at this point. When in your career did the mistake you're going to chat with me about today happen?
Way too early. Like early enough that you get super freaked out about the future of your career.
Nothing like a little early career anxiety. Mm-hmm. Okay. So tell me kind of what you were trying to do in the mistake that happened.
So this is right when, like, all the Canada spam laws were coming out and like, you're hearing about them. And we— I had prior worked with an agency to learn Marketo and they got us all set up and everything. And then I graduated and then they weren't there anymore to support me and I had to do this project all by myself. And I was so excited because it was my first like really big project solo. And we're working in Marketo and I have everything set up ready to like coordinate people's opt-ins, whether it was explicit or implied, like if they're a customer or whatever from Canada. And so everything's up and running, ready to go. I tested all of the opt-in stuff, pretended I got a VPN from Canada. Like I did everything. It was awesome. One thing I did not do. What happens is I come into work the next morning after this launches and I have an email in my inbox saying, hey, you're going to be unsubscribed if you don't continue to opt in to receive our emails. And I'm like, like all the blood like drops down into your stomach and you're freaking out. You're like, okay, I did something wrong. Hopefully it's just because my VPN was set to Canada still or something. I don't know what's going on. So I'm like, quickly, you know how you like get in Marketo and you're like, Frantically trying to figure out what happened. I go into Marketo, try to see like what's going on. I realized that basically the entire freaking database got my email saying you're gonna be unsubscribed from this. And next thing I know, we've got people from the whole company like talking about it. Like, why'd I get this email? And like, why are you unsubscribing me? I work here. It was, it was really bad.
To this day, do you know what caused it? Was it just like, so you said Marketo's smart list logic error or like kind of more specifically what happened?
Oh yeah. Here I was being like, the agency always told me to optimize your campaigns. So like add extra filters and blah, blah, blah. So I was like adding extra filters to do people who, like, if you're unsubscribed, you don't need this email. If you're whatever, I had like 13 filters and I'd set it to any instead of all. And you know how like it takes forever to load the number of people that's going to process, I just go home because I'm like, I know I did it right. I'm just going to leave. It was a big mistake.
I've had one of those as well, and mine was definitely later in my career than right at the beginning where I did the any/all issue also. So it sounds like pretty much everyone noticed it. In this scenario, right? Including like the C-suite and stuff?
Yes. One of the first people who asked me what happened was the CEO because he didn't want to be unsubscribed. So like, I'm pretty sure I was as red as a tomato when he walked up to my desk and inquired. He was very nice about it, probably nicer than I deserved, actually.
But So once it was like public knowledge, what did you kind of do at that point to remedy the situation?
It was the worst day because this was before abort campaign. And so I just had to sit there and watch the emails go out all day. And I called Marketo support and I called the agency we had worked with and like there was no abort campaign. They're all like, you just got to let it happen. And it was really, really, really depressing. And so I did create I created like another campaign that I had removed from Flow, and I tried to remove as many people out as I could. And it then it did end up getting like half of the list or something, but that still sucks, you know. But and then of course, like I removed some Canadians, so I had to do it again the next day to get the actual Canadians. And the whole thing was a giant mess.
It sounds like you kind of inevitably openly acknowledged the mistake to internal stakeholders. But was there any formal communication internally about the email to internal stakeholders or external stakeholders?
So lucky for me, this was— we were trying to get ahead of the game. So it was before the Canada spam laws actually like were live or whatever. So we kind of got away with a little bit of it. We sent an oops email to everyone who got it, everyone who it was delivered to, and I don't remember exactly what we did for internal communications, but I definitely went around and personally apologized to every single C-suite member.
Nothing like a little humility. Beyond the unfortunately painful lesson of letting your Spark campaign limits load, which we've learned the hard way, a couple of us at least, what else did you learn during your remediation process?
The number one thing I learned actually was less of an ops thing and more of just like a professional thing, but own up to your mistakes right away because there is no getting around when you screw up, especially when you're in this line of work. People are going to know. And like, if you don't own up to it, you just look like a jackass at the end of the day. And so take responsibility. You'll just be better off for it.
Yeah, I very much agree. Do you have any processes? Do you put any processes in place at that role or any processes that you've taken with you into other roles to avoid mistakes like that in the future?
Yes and yes. So personally, I will never, ever, ever run any campaign unless I can see how many people are qualified for it. I am— the first thing I do at any job now is I go look at the smart campaign limits and make sure it's less in the entire database in the admin. And then many jobs that I've had or clients that I've worked with throughout the years, I always do a QA checklist and somebody else has to verify if something especially compliance-related is going on. Somebody else has to QA and make sure everything looks right.
I love that. I hadn't really thought about ever checking the admin limits to make sure that column limits are less than the whole database. But that's a really nice, like, oh shit, failsafe.
Cool.
So a couple of final thoughts. What would you say to the inevitable person that makes a similar mistake at some point in their career?
Kind of like I said earlier, definitely own up to it. There's no getting around it. And people will honestly respect you for having the integrity to do that. And also just Like, be really careful when you do work because it's easy in a job when you do the same kind of job every day and the same work for it to kind of get not mundane, but just repetitive. Like, you feel like you're clicking the same buttons and you're doing the same stuff, but that doesn't mean it's cool to get lazy and not QA your work.
Yeah, QA is super, super important. I know my personal role It was like nothing goes out the door without extra eyes on it. So what more general advice do you have for any fellow marketing or RevOps professionals listening in?
Don't let mistakes make you really sad, because I also did that and I had a super rough time and lost all of my confidence in my career, my abilities, which is Stupid because everyone makes mistakes no matter what you're doing. And yeah, I would say like, don't let things like that get you down. Just make sure you use them as learning experience.
I love that. Well, that's, I think, a good note to end on. So thanks so much for taking the time to chat with us today, Rachel. I'm excited to share this one.
