Today I recieved an email from – no, I won’t name and shame – but basically the from address was: ‘noreply@nameofcompany.com’.
It recalled to mind Seth’s blog post: "If you don’t want to get email…Don’t send email"
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/07/if-you-dont-wan.html
I love Seth Godin’s blog – who doesn’t? He has the ability to remind us not to accept the things we sometimes blindly accept.
How long have we all been sitting back and accepting ‘donotreply’ emails from our service providers, retail vendors, utility providers etc etc?
Worst still – how many of us implement this tactic within our own email campaigns?
The reasons why not to do things are numerous, but 2 significant and obvious reasons are:
1: Using an invalid and not functioning email address may stop your emails from being delivered
2: You cheese off your customer – especially as most of the email I recieve like this are customer service based emails.
One of the wonderous benefits of email marketing is that it is a two-way channel. The more interactivity and the more replies -the (generally) more successful a campaign is considered to be.
So, why limit your success?
Be Relevant 
Now, I agree. But when you mail out 30 000+ mails and you get 700 bounces back, it’s kind of hard to filter out the good replies that need an answer.
Any solution for that problem?
Stefan, setting up mail filters gets you a long way already. Most of the replies will have standard text in them. Just set up a filter that sends messages containing this text in either the body or the subject line to a separate folder…
Good reply Tamara and thanks Stefan for your question – filters are definitely the easiest and most economical way of doing this. You also need to put it in perspective. If a marketer were to run a TV ad selling a product, then they would be negligent not to set up telemarketers to deal with the questions and sales and a robust website to deal with the replies and orders. This is just a different channel…so whether your email campaign is selling a product or it’s a customer service email informing them of a new service or a price increase – you need to give them a way to reply. It’s all part of relationship selling and shows good customer service, so it’s well worth making the effort to implement a system which will deal with the replies.
Actually I’ve just read a post by my friend Russell on his new blog: Email Vigilance.
It mentions a couple of possible solutions to consider…
http://emailvigilance.blogspot.com/2008/09/no-reply-no-no.html