Customer service email response time expectations are such that a lead or customer expects to get an email reply to an email inquiry within minutes or, at worst, a few hours. That means that if you are taking more than a few hours to respond to a customer's email, and especially to a lead or prospect's email, you are both tarnishing your company's reputation, and losing out on business - in fact, you are effectively turning business away. Instead, answer it immediately, or at least as soon as you can, even if it's just to acknowledge it and say that you will get back to them more fully later.
Do not use a noreply email address in the email you send out; just don't do it. Don't send out email with a noreply email address as the 'from' email address, don't send out email from an address that can't accept replies, just don't go near any type of noreply email address at all. Besides being the opposite of best practices, think about what happens if you reply to a noreply email. When someone to whom you send email doesn't notice the noreply email address from which you sent the email, they will reply and either get a bounce (frustrating) or get no response (also frustrating). And if they do notice the noreply email address, that on its own will frustrate them. Why would you want to frustrate your customers, leads, or others to whom you are sending email? But beyond that, there are important technical reasons to not use noreply email addresses. Here they are.
The results of two studies which looked at whether people are less inclined to be honest in email are out, and the answer is a big "yes". Based on these studies, at least, people tend to lie a lot in email. In fact, the two studies, published jointly as a paper entitled "Being Honest Online: The Finer Points of Lying in Online Ultimatum Bargaining", found that in their tests, subjects were likely to lie as much as 92% of the time!
While I'm off at the last of the three conferences in four weeks (actually I'm running the Boulder Business Retreat), I thought I'd share this little example of what not to do with your email marketing. I should be back more regularly next week; I hope you've missed me as much as I've missed you! Today's shining example of a company that just doesn't get it is AmericaRX.com.
Challenge response systems have been around long enough now that pretty much everybody has an opinion on them. The end users who use challenge response systems seem to love them. But legitimate email senders often never respond to challenges, and so the end users are actually missing out on a lot of wanted email.
We've talked in the past about why address book importing is just not ok. But in addition to the fact that it trains people to enter their passwords at third-party sites, and to the fact that when you send out all those invitations it makes you look like a spammer, there's another big reason to not do address book importing.
We got the following in the mail this week from United Airlines: "Watch your email during the week at August 11 to receive a valuable limited-time offer from United for international travel this fall." Something has gone horribly wrong when in order for an email marketing campaign to be effective, you first have to send your customers something via the post office to alert them to watch their inbox.
You may or may not have heard the furor over Spamza - the website where anybody can enter any email address, and have that email address instantly signed up for hundreds of newsletter mailing lists. Of course, everybody is very upset because this site facilitates people getting spammed. BUT, there is also a very important lesson here for email marketers, newsletter publishers, and just about any other email sender who maintains a mailing list.
Three things happened within the last 24 hours which lead me to feel that today we need to talk about email personalization.
Listen to Our Blogcast
- Iowa, Montana, Indiana, and Tennessee Join the Ranks of States with Email Opt-in Requirement in New Data Privacy Laws (Season 3 Episode 8)
- New Texas Data Privacy Law is Strict on Email Collection and Email Marketing (Season 3 Episode 7)
- The Value of a Political Email List: Ready for Ron (RFR) versus the FEC (Season 3 Episode 6)
- Who is Behind the Domain Kmail-lists? Here's Who (Season 3, Episode 5)
- Get a Great Return on SMS Marketing While Following SMS Marketing Laws and Best Practices (Season 3 Episode 6)