Panning For Inbox Gold
Posted by admin on April 1st, 2009
It is pretty typical for companies to use a functioning but not monitored email address as their “from name” in an email marketing strategy. Examples of this are the common “info@” or “sales@ “ structure. If a company has a large list or sends frequent mailings it is possible that this inbox could receive thousands of reply-to messages. Some of the more common include out of office replies and the dreaded “hard bounce” undeliverable, but what about the others -customers who do not pay attention to the “do not reply to this message” text, change of address notifications, challenge/response triggers, etc. Developing a plan to monitor these messages could provide some significant benefits.
A study of a B to B publisher done by Bamboo Cricket (a 3rd party service who can monitor/respond to your inbound email) found that as much as 6-8% of the sender’s outbound email volume resulted in an inbound response. As one would expect, most of these messages were non-essential, but over 9% were, in fact, high value communications requiring a human response.
If these results are typical, lets say you sent a message to 100,000 recipients, you would receive a “reply” from 6,000-8,000 of them, of which 540-720 would be high value communication. Would you let your call center or customer service department ignore 700 inquires? In this economy it is important to take advantage of every opportunity to build loyalty and retain customers.
There is no question that personally reviewing thousands of inbound responses can be a lot like panning for gold. You could spend all day with nothing to show for it, or perhaps you may find a few nuggets. Whether you develop an entire plan around this process or just do an Nth message sampling, you may find that “there is gold in them there replies. ”
