The dreaded no-reply email

The other day I subscribed to a daily newsletter from a new "social media" website. Let me first emphasize that this is a new website - they have just become beta. So, they're not big, they're a small startup.

I tried to reply to one of the emails they send each day. And I quickly discovered they send these using a no-reply address. Meaning I COULDN'T reply.

And that broke my brain. This is a company which is all about web 2.0 and the new communication mechanisms available. Yet they have broken the single most used communication process of the internet!!! Why would they do this? People have been sending and replying to emails for decades now. Decades. And it works.

Email replies are free feedback

Letting your customers reply to the emails you sent is like getting free feedback. I don't know about you, but I LOVE talking with my email marketing customers. I get specific feedback on what they're looking for, the problems they're trying to solve, and their business situation. All of that is incredibly useful for me in creating new features and marketing my service.

I would never, ever think of breaking the reply-to of my email newsletter or the welcome emails my system sends when people sign up. NEVER. In fact, I explicitly state that they can simply reply to the confirmation email if they have any questions. Sometimes they do.

And here's a really important metric. The people that reply to that confirmation email (when they sign up) almost ALWAYS become customers. Why? Because they ask some questions and I reply directly to each of their questions. And then BOOM, they purchase my service.

For me, having people purchase my product is pretty important. And if answering a few emails is all it takes to make a sale, then hell, email away. So why do some small businesses disable the reply-to?

You're Not That Big

I think small companies look to big companies for how they should do things. They see Amazaon.com or some other big web based business breaking the reply-to and they think "well, this is what the big guys do, so maye I should as well." At least that is what I'm guessing.

But you're not that big. Even if you are HUGE, with millions of customers, you should still not break the reply-to, which I'll explain later.

So, you're a small web based business. Please, do NOT do what the big lazy businesses do. You should be extremely happy anytime anyone sends you an email.

Dialogue is the best way to get business and email is the easiest way to start a dialogue with a customer.

You should be encouraging replies, not breaking them with a no-reply email.

Even if you ARE big, don't be Lazy

Any business that sends emails from a no-reply address is either stupid or lazy.

Or both.

And I don't care how many emails they send.

Before you start ranting about the volume of emails that they send and the cost of processing all those inbound emails, lemme just point out that I'm not stupid (although I am lazy) and I'm also a bit of a programmer.

So, how do you handle all these inbound emails if you can't have a person or people replying to each of them?

Simple. First, you have software parse the incoming email looking for questions. You run those questions through software which attempts to find items in a knowledge base which address your question. Trouble ticket software does this already. So, if you have a trouble ticket system, you could route these incoming replies into that system. Most of them have email gateways.

Also, smart software would differentiate between emails that have short questions and emails that have multiple paragraphs. Short questions can have an auto response back with links to the knowledge base based on the software's analysis of the question - exactly like the fancy trouble ticket systems in use today. Long replies (whatever you define as long) are probably worth reading by a person. So you can route those to a real person.

OR, if you're really cool, you could use the Mechanical Turk to tag those emails and then have software route those emails based on the human tagging of the Turk

See what I'm getting at?

Don't be lazy. And don't be stupid. Be Smart. Email replies are golden. They come from current or potential customers.

Let me say that again. Email replies come from current or potential customers.

And if customers are important to you, then treat these emails according to the value they could provide.

The Real Value of an Email Address

Background

An ongoing discussion in the email marketing world is the following question.

"How much is an email address worth?"

(click here to see how prevalent this question is)

And the answers you find will range from $1 on up.

All of those answers are somewhat wrong. Sorry to say.

The Value of an Email Address Is...

Nothing.

Zero. Zilch. Nada.

You don't believe me? Ok, how about this. Here's an email address: bill@microsoft.com. How about another: steve@apple.com.

Here's a whole bunch.

joe.blow@comcast.info
miriam.johnson@foobar.org
philip.h.crawford@myspace.com

You get the picture? You can buy email addresses (of real people) from spammers for less than a tenth of a cent. Yep, that cheap. And a tenth of a cent rounds to zero for most businesses.

But now you're probably saying "hold on!, I have an email list and you email marketers tell me the ROI is SO great, so my list must be worth something."

Oh, and it is. It's likely worth a lot, read on.

It Isn't the Email Address

The value of a subscriber is in the relationship. The reason you place no value on the email addresses I provided above is because you have no relationship with them.

And if all you have is an email address that someone submitted in a signup form, do you really have enough information to engage them? Think about it this way, if you are sitting at a table with someone and the only thing you know is their first name, can the two of you really have a conversation? Not two way you can't. Sure, you can tell that person a lot of stuff - and this is what most beginner marketers do, but you can't really have a two way conversation, which is the key to email marketing.

So, let's get back to your list. If all you have is an email address, you know there was some reason they thought they could get value from your marketing emails. That's really it. Unless you have more information about them (think columns in your list spreadsheet), you won't be able to engage them. I've written before about list size and that it has more than one dimension.

An engaged subscriber is not simply an email address. It is a person. It's you, it's me, your mom, brother, cousin, friend, neighbor. And none of us, (none) wants you to send us impersonal email blasts. You don't, I don't.

The Value of an Engaged Subscriber List

Let's try a thought experiment.

Let's say you own a restaurant and each month you get the good chance to sit down at a table and tell one of your friends about the upcoming specials, events, and anything else going on with your restaurant. Your friend has "subscribed" to these monthly chats. First, imagine that during these chats you ask your friend no questions - you simply talk at him/her for 15 straight minutes. You wouldn't do that right? Ok, cool. So you would ask questions. You'd probably ask them about their experience the last time they were at your restaurant and you might ask them if there was anything missing from your restaurant that would interest them. Right?

So, from these chat sessions, what value do you think you'd get? First, your friend would probably eat at your restaurant more often, right? Maybe once more per year? Twice? Four times? What is that incremental increase worth to you?

Also, you'd receive valuable information about deficiencies in your restaurant. You value customer comments, I hope, yes? Great, then you'd get that value as well.

So you see, the value of a subscriber depends totally on how much you know about that subscriber and the level of engagement you have with that subscriber. No engagement, no value.

Zip. Zero. Zilch.

Open Rates Have Lost Their Usefulness

Some Background

How opens are tracked. There are basically two ways:

• A small invisible image called a web beacon is inserted in the email. This image is specific to a subscriber so when they open the email and their software requests the image from the sending server, the software knows what subscriber downloaded the image. And the open is recorded.
• If a subscriber clicks a link in the email and the link is tracked (which hopefully your ESP is doing), then an open is recorded. Not all service providers have this implemented and if yours doesn't, they are lame. It makes no sense for a click to be tracked and an open to not be recorded. Our software does this.

What is the problem with tracking open rates?

Many times the email is opened and read, but an open is not recorded. Here are the ways:

• Web beacons are stripped by the email software. Yes, beacons are reasonably easy to identify and the software simply strips them out. The subscriber can have images displayed, but since the web beacon was stripped out, no open is recorded.
• The subscriber reads the email with images off. Many email programs have images off by default and if your email is primarily text, the subscriber may not display images - they might simply read the email with images off.
• The subscriber has a blackberry or other device and reads the text only.

Other times the image is downloaded, but the email is not read:

• The subscriber is using Outlook with the preview pane and images are enabled. They don't actually open the email, but the web beacon is downloaded and an open is recorded.
• The email server of the subscriber automatically downloads all images within the subscribers email. We can see this happens because on some domains, all opens occur within seconds of the actual sent time. That wouldn't consistently happen unless a machine was doing the downloading of the web beacon.
  
• The subscriber opens the email and they have images enabled, but they don't read it at all.
  

So What Does It All Mean?

It means you should stop paying attention to the actual number. The only thing important about open rates is a way to measure list fatigue and if you are performing A/B testing. And even with list fatigue you need to be careful, because your open rate could be declining due to the increased use of image blocking software.


So What Should You Focus On?

Clicks. And Sales (or donations). Basically you should track actions by the subscriber because that is what you're trying to do. By focusing on clicks, you will use more links (one of the most common errors is having too few of links in the content) and then, using google analytics, you can also track what the subscriber does once they are on your website.

And by the way, clicks should always be tracked as a percentage of the number of emails sent (less the bounces).

But this requires a whole new article, which I will write in the near future.

Pavlov's Dog: Conditioning Your Subscribers

Have you ever signed up for a newsletter only to receive irrelevant emails from the sender? How many months do you give them before you stop opening them?

And let me ask you this. Do their boring, irrelevant, highly sales oriented emails add positively to your thinking about their brand? (No, right?)

There is a marketing term called "top of mind" that leads many marketers to think that if they don't send emails often enough, their customers will forget about them and they will no longer be "top of mind." This thinking is completely backwards. Top of Mind is established by engagement. By creating a valuable two way conversation with your customers where they feel you listen to them. Where they don't simply feel like Just Another Customer.

Yet Another Boring Email

Every email you send you should be concerned about sending Yet Another Boring Email (yabe). Because if you do, you will be training your customers to stop reading your emails. You will be training them to ignore you. And this is a very costly mistake as it will take much more time and money to win back their attention than it was in the first place to convince them to sign up.

People (your customers) are much like Pavlov's dogs. We do learn and we respond to conditioning. Send me 3 emails in a row that are not relevant to me and I might stop reading every one. I might open a few more in the future, but if those are not relevant you've probably lost me as a subscriber - and this causes list fatigue.

And if you are like me, you rarely go back to reading an email newsletter once you stop reading it.


Synopsis:

• Beware of conditioning them to ignore/not open your emails
• Condition them to open the email (with value)
  

Over time, they will learn based on the value you provide that your emails are worth their time. Otherwise, they will learn that your emails are NOT worth their time.

Your choice.