The team over at MailChimp introduces ReplyTo: an app to handle auto-replies which land by the thousands in the inbox linked to your newsletter reply-to address.
The service is free to all, regardless of whether you’re a MailChimp client or not. The way the service works is that it analyzes all the replies that come in, and forwards those that fit certain rules that have been set up. The other replies like standard out-of-office replies will sit in the inbox where everything lands. Read more
Even in the year 2011 I see quite some organizations use a noreply address as their from address used in email marketing campaigns. Reasons they mention for doing so vary from technical like ‘we can’t create or maintain an email address’ to simple ‘we don’t want people to reply’ or ‘ people don’t need to reply to this’. But hang on, you are getting in touch with people through email, shouldn’t they be allowed to respond via the same channel? Seems logical, right?
There are some examples where, at first glance, a response would not be needed or catered for. One is a notification email of subscribing for something or ordering something, another is a digital invoice or other transactional email. But then again, why wouldn’t you as an organization facilitate a reply? Imagine the amount of knowledge building, relationship building and caretaking communications you could do if it was two-way communication? It might save a lot of load on other communications channels like phone lines, forms or paperwork if people were allowed to reply on your emails. The receiver of an email would feel less ‘blocked’ when receiving an email which would not have a noreply address as the from address.
If I take a look at the first example of not doing so, which is not being able to create or maintain an email address, to me that seems as if a marketing department is not taking their email marketing seriously. On one hand you are busy running email campaigns, very probably (hopefully) through the use of an ESP platform, but on the other hand not facilitating for feedback through the same channel. It seems like putting out a lot of (marketing) messages into the wild but not setting up the correct web of response catchers to see how people respond and what they actually want from you. Being succesful in marketing means you should be listening and doing something with that feedback at least half of the time.’
The other example of ‘we don’t want people to reply’ or ‘ people don’t need to reply to this’ is actually the worst one. That sounds like ‘we’re allowed to send this stuff to you, but don’t you go replying to us!’. Customer care anyone? If an organization wants to send me their business through email let me respond to it: it’ll help them make their business better, sell more, be a better marketer and so on. Even with a simple notify email a response can be justified. How about a situation like a form that has been filled in, and someone receives the notification with the form transcript, but notice that they’ve put in something wrong. That person would like to update the form data but the form has already been sent. Replying to the notification email would be the next logical step. It would save a phone call, a wrong filled in form done right and would score bonus points on the level of professional service you provide to the person who filled in the form.
For those of you still using a noreply address: welcome to 2011. Time to upgrade, time to go two-way with email marketing. It will reward your company in so many ways that it will definitely be worth doing it.
When you use words like personally, taylored content, or such specifics which suggest you (or at least the marketing system you’re using) know a person, don’t start the message with Dear Sir / Madam. Alas this was the case with an invitation for the European Email Marketing Conference I received from an ESP:
It’s a logical fallback from a more correct “Dear Remy” or “Dear Mr. Bergsma” but when you give the suggestion in your message that you are trying to connect on a personal level it should be avoided that a fallback in personalization would even be necessary: all data fields used in such a message should be known about someone. When all data is known the message is actually personalized and doesn’t contradict itself in the first few lines already.
Bonus tip: even with such invitations don’t forget to include an unsubscribe option: it was missing from this message.
This holiday season, Santa’s going to have a problem. Not because Rudolf is being silly or Comet is not a good team player, but inboxes of consumers are filling up to the limit these days. For instance recently Hotmail’s Product Manager Dan Lewis noted that no less than 15% to 20% of emails received by Hotmail users are social media notifications. As retailers are increasing the email frequency as well, especially during the holiday season, inboxes will be crowded. There are many other things received these days by email as well, compared to old times. A list:
- invoices and purchase confirmations
- welcome campaign messages from subscriptions
- tickets for events, movies, trips and more
- media like presentations, personal movies, pictures
- earlier noted social media notifications
- software update notifications
- (internal) event and agenda notifications from your own agenda, company or group
- spam (sorry, it’s still part of email sadly)
- ‘regular’ private email
There are some special categories here: the last one is the classic one: in the old days all you did is just send and receive email to and from the people you knew. If you only had a personal account and received more than 10 emails a week, it was a lot. Another special category is the second one: automated campaign messages, especially welcome messages from new subscriptions, have been growing more and more in recent years. This is possible due to the marketing automation tools available on many ESP platforms these days.
The last special one is the first one: there are experiments going on with ordering and paying within an email by and with selected companies. This means you’ll get an invoice on your electricity or insurance for exampleand can pay for it right away in the email: no logging in, no codes, just accord it and it’s paid.
A giant mailbox in Greenland. Better get ready for holiday season.
All the other categories have been subtly but steadily starting new streams of email into the inbox, costing more time and effort from the receiver to handle. The trouble is: the receiver doesn’t have any more time: the same time is shared between all those emails now, which means less time per email. Some webmail providers like GMail have been trying to solve the problem through providing Priority Inbox: but that’s more of a smart filter than an actual solution to the problem. Getting less email is the actual only solution to the problem, because the problem originates from receiving too much of it in the first place. The trouble is: how to achieve this?
A recent chat message from Peter Roebuck during an eMailradio broadcast noted the following:
allwebemail: I’ve started unsubscribing from newsletters and instead reading just those articles that are popular with my twitter peeps. It’s a great filter.
This is simply a choice by Peter: he chooses to receive (a certain portion of) his news and information through another channel. Just like the option for people to subscribe to RSS and read it in their Google Reader instead of going to websites and reading news and blog posts there. So here are some tips (definitely not a complete list) to survive the holiday season:
- Turn off all social media notifications (you’ll be on those channels all the time or at least once a day anyway, right? Either via mobile or other device)
- Choose your channel of choice on news/blog updates: be it RSS, Twitter, or yes, email: spread the input over multiple channels
- Move stuff like media to ‘the cloud’: have an intranet microblogging option like Yammer (in your company) or chat privately available to share media
- Have software updates just update, or not: good software tells you when an update is available
- Change the frequency at which you receive newsletters and sale offers from retailers
Of course, these are just some tips: there are dozens of things you can do yourself to tame the inbox and be ready for the holiday season. For marketers, the challenge will be to get your email campaigns right in terms of timing, content and way of delivering that content: that will be key for you to be succesful with your holiday email campaigns. Good luck!
