The Hidden Gems in E-mail Responses

Any DMer knows response management is critical to a campaign’s success. But in e-mail marketing, overseeing messages from those who don’t buy is just as essential as handling customer communications.

Too many direct marketers are missing opportunities to capitalize on responses from e-mail recipients, says John Rizzi, chief executive at e-mail service provider eDialog, Lexington, MA.

Also, though some messages — such as hard bounces where the address no longer exists — should be handled automatically, it takes human beings to deal properly with many nonbuying responses.

For instance, if someone asks to be removed from future mailings, yet spells the request incorrectly, an automated system may bungle the operation.

“If someone writes in a very strange way that they want to be removed from your list, you don’t want to miss that opt out because it’s against the law,” says Rizzi.

Address changes also require more human intervention. Some 95% arrive via auto-responder, as in “I no longer work here, my new address is…,” according to Rizzi.

Some e-mailers typically will monitor such so-called soft bounces and simply remove the addresses after a certain number of failures, he says. However, those that do this without reading the request risk losing subscribers who still want to receive mail.

“The number of address changes alone is becoming phenomenal because people are running away from spam and changing accounts every couple of months,” says Kara Austen-Leigh, eDialog’s senior customer support manager.

E-mail response management also helps avoid damage to the brand. A typical example, says Austen-Leigh, is the death notice. One eDialog client wanted its communications to be informal, and so sent confirmations to unsubscribe requests that said, “Sorry to see you go” — an inadvisable response to such a request due to a death.

Austen-Leigh says the best policy when responding to death notices is to send an e-mail with contact information should the recipient have any questions about the account, and then remove that address from the company’s files.

“Even a very professional template can sound too cold,” she adds. “We’ve had people write back in and say, ‘He was a good customer. How could you be so cold about it?’ It’s a very emotional time.”

Response management also can help merchants monitor technical glitches on their Web sites. Case in point: An eDialog client recently sent out a campaign and received responses stating that people were having trouble with the client’s shopping cart. “People who put things in their shopping carts and then changed their minds weren’t able to remove them,” Austen-Leigh says. “They weren’t placing orders because they couldn’t go forward.”

So e-mail should never leave an organization saying, “Please do not respond to this message,” Rizzi notes.

“Here’s an opportunity for businesses to hear from their customers, and they’re shutting them up,” he continues. “And probably the reason is because they can’t handle the incoming mail. They know they’re about to provide bad customer service so instead they say ‘Don’t even bother writing to us.’”

Rizzi adds: “There are gems of value in those responses that shouldn’t be ignored. You should consider any way a customer wants to communicate with you as a golden visit from that customer.”

eDialog employs seven people who each read 3,000 responses a day for the company’s 70 clients, according to Rizzi. Some 15 million e-mails arrive monthly.

From eDialog’s experience, an e-mailer exercising a reasonable degree of list hygiene can expect 5% of a blast to come back, Rizzi says, adding that 10% of what comes back “is of the quality that should get human intervention.”

As a result, a mailer should be prepared for human eyes to read half a percent of the number of e-mails that go out in any given campaign, he says. Human eyes on incoming e-mail also can see when an automatic response isn’t appropriate.

For example, when the Miami Dolphins’ former quarterback Dan Marino rejoined the team as an executive, e-mail poured in from fans.

“Our standard response to that would simply be ‘Thanks for your feedback,’” says Austen-Leigh. “But we didn’t think it was appropriate for someone who’s written a page and a half about their devotion to him.”

So eDialog crafted a custom reply, thanking senders on Marino’s behalf and explaining that while he couldn’t answer each of them personally, he appreciated the effort.

Of course, not all responses are actionable. One e-mail sent to the Dolphins said: “Dear Dan Marino, my fiancé is a die-hard Dolphin fan. Can you please attend our wedding?”