Email Marketing: Is Your Mailbox Manned?

Made Essential Reading on 04 May 2010 Richard Turrell

If I asked you what ‘From’ email address you use for email marketing campaigns would you know the answer without checking? Don’t worry if you’re currently shaking your head, you are definitely not alone.

Once you hit send on an email campaign it is too easy to sit back, brush the bead of sweat from your brow and wait to export the reports. But you may be forgetting something, the ‘from address’. To most people the ‘from address’ is discussed in strategic terms as a way to make people open the email and it is easy to forget that you are still sending an email to individual people.

What happens if people hit reply? Where does their email go?

If you are unable to answer either of these questions then it’s time to investigate. Find out what you are currently using as your ‘from’ address and send an email. There are usually two outcomes:

1) You’ll receive staggered responses from different people

This means that your from address is not being managed collectively and no-one is charged with managing the replies. This is most common for info@ sales@ address and seriously puts you at risk of having multiple team members trying to deal with the same request concurrently.

2) No-one replies

Self explanatory, if no-one replies you know then the email you are using is sitting in a black hole and it’s time to contact IT.

So why is this ‘from’ email address so important?

From a legal standpoint it is your responsibility to include a valid email address that people can use to opt out to. No matter how advanced your unsubscribe system people will still hit reply and ask to opt out. If nobody is managing these requests then you have a data issue on your hands.

Secondly from a business perspective you could be losing out on potential sales as you are inevitably ignoring your customers. Putting this into perspective it is very similar to never answering the office phone or locking the reception door.

What should you do?

Make a single person responsible for all incoming emails and create a process flow that includes key contacts for complaints, sales ops and data requests. If they are out of office make sure they hand it over to somebody else, it’s that simple.

What are you waiting for, send that test email!!