Why to manage “Reply-to” Inbox
Email marketing campaign is made of a wide range of parts. It is very important to pay enough attention to every part to get expected results. Sometimes it happens that email marketers do not consider some small bat worthy peculiarities. For example, not always the Reply-to Inbox is checked through the email marketing campaign. Even though the number of replies to that inbox is extremely small, just around 2%, it may provide you important and urgent information. Very often you can get the same information form replies, sent by subscribers to your Reply Inbox, instead of calculating all kind of rates.
So it is definitely worthy to monitor your Reply-to Inbox. Of course, it isn’t necessary to be you who accomplish this task, but anyway the monitoring should be done by somebody.
It should be noticed that the main quantity of such replies are generated automatically, but they shouldn’t be considered bounces. As it was said before a list may generate about 2% of replies, sometimes even less, but they can influence a lot on list integrity. The main part of replies are “out of office” reports, but there are several other types of reply messages you may get from your subscribers or automatically. These are auto-acknowledgements, challenged emails and inactive email addresses, etc.
“Out of office” replies. The amount of out-of-office replies is the biggest one you can get in your Reply-to Inbox. You have nothing to do with these email messages. But you have to remember, that mostly during holidays and vacations the volume of out-of-office replies grows extremely fast. That has a negative influence on your email marketing campaign.
Sample: I will be out of office for a week since September 20 till September 27 and will not be able to check emails. In urgent cases contact me…
Auto-acknownedgements. You don’t have to reply to them the same as to those of out-of-office replies. But after you get such replies you have to check your list and delete this email address. Removing is required because such replies come from robots, but not from person.
Sample: Thank you for your interest. We will try to respond within the next 6 hours.
Inactive addresses. In most cases such email messages notify you that the email owner has abandoned the address or it may contain update information. So the actions you should undertake are to check your list and remove the old address and insert the new one if provided.
Sample: Hello, as of January 10th 2007 I am no longer Company X worker, please contact me through…
Challenge-response requests. This category of replies is the smallest one, but the same the most important. In cases you get such email messages you have to reply immediately on them, otherwise your subscriber’s email system will never allow your email message to be delivered to recipient. This measure is used to protect user form spam messages. So if you do not consider replying on such messages your email can be blocked or delivered to a spam folder.
Sample: To confirm you are not a spam source, but a live human, please, respond to this message and leave the subject line intact.
Other messages that may be sent to your reply-to inbox are blocks and bounce reports and messages from subscribers that discovered any bugs in your message or just want to unsubscribe. The reports should be worked on as soon as possible, because they contain the exact cause of blocking the email. Thus you have to pay close attention to improve your sending and take off the elements, that cause blocking and bouncing. The same you have to carefully examine the problems subscribers report to you about and fix them as soon as possible.
You should also check all other tech-addresses to be sure you didn’t skip any important information about your email marketing campaign.
Monday, November 15th, 2010 : Email Marketing : No Comments