One of my biggest pet peeves is receiving an email from a major brand and seeing that they use a noreply@ email address. Seriously?! It is 2012 and some email marketers still use a noreply@ email address. The goal is to get your subscribers engaged about your brand and to have a conversation. Your subscribers may want to ask questions about your promo offers, have rendering issues with your email, or just want to pass along complaints or compliments.
Many email marketers that I talk to state that they don’t want to check multiple email addresses. One way to help is to set up an email forward so that replies go back to your main email inbox so that you can respond to any replies. The goal is to monitor these emails and respond no matter how many inboxes you have to check.
Not monitoring your reply email address could have other deliverability implications. Some people will not click the unsubscribe link and will reply to your email asking to be removed. Make sure that you honor these requests and suppress them. The last thing you want is for these people to click the spam button later and hurt your IP and domain reputation.
Another important reason to monitor your reply email address is if your email is sent to a domain where they never signed up for your email, the mail administrator may try to contact you at the reply email address. This could be a crucial moment because if you don’t respond back, they may report you to a blacklist and/or try to contact the Email Service Provider or Data Center to complain about your email. This ultimately goes back to list hygiene and sending email to only those that have signed up for it.
Until next time, stay relevant, stay engaged, and get delivered!
The best way to handle this and show you are in touch with “today” and set the replies to post to your social network. It makes you look responsible and attentive to your customers needs. After all, if you don’t post it first, they will and having an upper hand in the game of excellent customer service is the thing that will get you ahead.
I realize the need to monitor wild replies, but someone should be on top of the social networking anyhow.
I think I’d recommend instead communicating through the channel of choice of the person who initiated the conversation. If an inquiry comes in on Facebook, by all means respond to it there. But if it comes via email – and the person who sent it isn’t even on Facebook or Twitter – the only way to make sure the person gets the response he/she needs is through email.
But to your point, I have seen brands make good use of email inquiries through social media, by posting blog entries or posts on FB that respond to common inquiries as if they are FAQs. That shows customer responsiveness and proactiveness (proaction?), and also heads off more of the same questions and comments before they’re asked.
I agree, (sorry I didn’t clarify), if the channel is set to email. If it’s designed to auto post replies to [favorite social network] , you can drive your subscribers to be connected to your [favorite social network] for means of communication and customer service if that not only suits your business but your clients are there already (100% or not). It can also help keep customer service under control rather then trying to have those representatives address more channels then they can feasibly handle. no?