If your site is down and you send out an email, does anyone see it?

The answer is yes, and shame on you. I'm most likely not going to go back and click again on the emails up for insult today because I don't plan on monitoring when the sites will be available, not to mention how buried those emails will be by the time I remember that there was a sale with a pretty hefty discount. There goes your revenue stream. Best part? It happened twice. I received an Ann Taylor email, clicked through to their "down for maintenance" website, then received an email from Loft, Ann's younger, more casual sister, clicked through (mostly out of curiosity) to their "sorry for the inconvenience, check back soon" website. At the very least, the websites had pretty splash pages instead of broken images or blank pages, but still a bad user experience.

Side note: The leak strategy topic has come up a lot lately around the water cooler, and now I'm skeptical that any mistakes are real, although I can't really see the added benefit of this type of mistake. Bad press is bad press. If I'm understanding the concept right, you want, at the bare minimum, a neutral mistake, one that doesn't reflect poorly on your brand, but gets people talking about you via all the major social channels. The goal there is to get a message to go viral and watch acquisition and engagement increase on your email program. Side-side note: Make sure you have a somewhat well-rounded email program in place for this. "Batch and blasts" only work in the short term, and all your effort will be for a spike that you can't repeat until next year -- read "these don't make an impact if you do them all the time."