Friday, September 05, 2008

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.

9 comments:

Unknown said...

One big reason firms use the dreaded no-reply is to prevent a deluge of email bounce backs from overflowing their email boxes after a big blast.

The trick is using the "no-reply" properly. The "no-reply" address should be the "from" address...then make sure emails use the "reply-to" address option, which should be the address of the person who would actually receive the reply.

Bounce backs always go to the "from" address. Clicking "reply" wil go to the "reply-to" address...if it's specified.

Philip Crawford said...

Hey, thanks for the comment!

I guess you agree that breaking the reply-to (which these companies are doing) is not a good practice.

btw, the bounce backs are very dependent on the receiving email server. Some go back to the from, some to the sender.

Besides, disk space is essentially free and these are simply very small text files. I have puny servers and overflowing them from bounces has never happened, even though we send millions of emails every month.

bloodtrain said...

We're currently looking into using the no-reply practice because some customers are reporting that we're spamming them. What happens is that they send an email to customer service and they then receive an auto-reply. However, some customers have auto-reply setup on their mailbox so then our customer service mailbox receives their auto-reply and then this goes on and on and on.

We're thinking about setting up a no-reply mailbox that will send the auto-reply message. In the message, we will have the customer service email that they can click on if they wish to send us another email.

Anonymous said...

Phillip,

Some companies use no reply emails to generate information only to their client base. These companies are not able to receive email replies or other emails with attachments due to compliance regulations. This could apply to large and small businesses. Thanks for your blog, it was interest reading.

Kim

Anonymous said...

That's a really stupid idea bloodtrain. Try getting a decent auto-reply for your customer service - one that doesn't auto reply to responses to itself.

So bloodtrain, you should:
1) Get a better auto-reply system
2) Don't auto-reply at all
3) Give up on this whole internet fad

Philip Crawford said...

@bloodtrain, I'll try to say what Anonymous said, but a little less acerbic. :)

Most quality auto-responders are smart enough to know when the incoming message:

a) is an automated message
b) is a bounce
c) has already been auto-responded to

Infinite loops are generally caused by techs who don't know how to set them up properly.

Robert Stevens said...

Hi Philip,


Don't you think that this is a tidious process. Because if you are a person who gets 50 sign ups a day and in your busy schedule let alone 50 will there be enough time to read 10 and reply to them all?


Robert Stevens
http://www.omnistarmailer.com

Philip Crawford said...

Hi Robert,

Every signup email I've ever sent has allowed the person to reply. This has been the case over the last 4.5 years and 3 different web based businesses. Thousands of emails sent out. Very small percentage are replied to. And for those that do, the percentage that become paying customers is much higher than the group as a whole.

And if there was ever a time the volume was too much, well I'd hire staff and write some code.

btw, the startup this article refers to is no longer in business.

- Phil

Anonymous said...

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