1) Larger companies have servers dedicated to sending out mass emails and the email address has to resolve back to the sending server properly or the spam filters kill it.
2) They need you to click the links in the email for analytics. Learning what offers get the most traction HELPS them AND YOU so they deliver relevant content in the future.
3) If you use a "support" or "sales" email as the sender and then send the mass email to 100,000 people, you are going to get 20,000 bounce-backs, littering your support email channel and support software with garbage.
4) You can't have people replying with "don't email me again" because those will get missed. Again, you can't have a large list and realistically go through all the bounce-backs looking for legitimate unsubscribe messages - the links IN the email need to be used for this.
It's not fair to compare email campaigns to calling a company on the phone. Apples and Oranges.
His whole point is that if you feel the need to blast me with your semi-important offer, you should feel the need to listen to my response.
Most of your points just highlight that having a do-no-reply is a simple convenience to the sender at the expense of the receiver. That is exactly the attitude that he is talking about.
His whole point is that it isn't convenient for HIM. Consumers seem to think they should get EVERYTHING they want, but in this situation, the harm done is miniscule, and it isn't meant to create pain for the consumer, it's meant to run the business as efficiently and intelligently as possible.
He doesn't mention anything about offers I don't believe, and I'm not strictly talking about offers either, I'm referring to any email that HAS to get through to the consumer, whether it's an offer or an update.
Since, in effect, he's the one paying to receive the message and, potentially, paying for reading it with his time, I agree with him that his convenience is more important than that of the sender.
Your bounce-back to the reply can simply be to redirect the user to the proper channels of support based on their specific request.
If a customer needs support, you don't want them pulling up that last "offer" email they received and trying to get help with a technical problem. From a company perspective, you would lose control.
Just bounce back 2 links:
1) Click here for sales.
2) Click here for support.
I am not attacking you but your argument. What decade are we living in? The 1960s? Why must I sort my question into the correct category before choosing an emal address for the company?
Email filtering and classification software can and should handle this with aplomb. Is there any argument whatsoever that existing technology can't classify questions by email in such a constrained problem space?
The point here is that the company can and should handle responses and figure out how to route them in a cost-effective manner, not throw up roadblocks in the form of links to click or multiple email addresses to use to post a question.
But these bouncebacks are predictable, no? There are several key words in them that identify them as bouncebacks, no? So make a spam filter for them, and it'll work great, especially because the mail programs aren't trying to evade spam filters with their messages.
Have you ever dealt with over 1000 bounce-back messages? It's as if every email server on the planet uses a different bounce-back method and message. It's terribly unpredictable. And false positives are the problem I'm talking about.
If you allow bounce-backs or replies with personalized messages, as a larger company, you have to let them through or you will miss something. I don't know support departments big enough to wade through this amount of junk every time you have to notify your user base of something.
What technology can deal with spam, where the originator is actively and maliciously trying to break your filtering algorithm, but is helpless when dealing with bounce-backs, where there is no such intent?
Then you haven't looked very hard. Every CRM system worth its salt (including the free OTRS) supports this. Either by inserting a cookie into the initial mail ("please leave this line intact when you reply") or, smarter, by assigning a dedicated reply-to address to each recipient.
It's not rocket science and adding a "do not reply to this mail" speaks volumes about how little you care about customer service.
And you didn't even mention the Out Of Office automailers in different languages. Or, god forbid, you actually want to send an email with the word "vacation" in the subject -- how can you filter the replies?
99,999% of MTA bounces can be automatically classified, there's not so many different MTA implementations in the wild. The same applies to 99,9% of vacation responders because most people use the standard templates from their Outlook or Webmailer.
The rest is intern-food. A single person can easily classify 20+ mails per minute. And that's what happens in companies with real customer service.
Uh, have you ever actually tried? Because I have, and neither of those numbers are anywhere close to what I experienced. It's probably true that a plurality of the messages are standard Outlook autoresponders, but not "most" -- and definitely not 99.9%. And a very large number of MTAs are either misconfigured or intentional subvert the standard in order to confuse spammers.
These days there are thousands of "So and So doesn't work here any more" messages that have to be removed from the list by hand, then the people using Lotus Notes, Eudora, and god knows what else. Also non-standard Outlook messages and Outlook messages in different languages. Worst is those whitelist anti-spam challenges that require you to fill out a CAPTCHA (or pay the spam filtering company a bribe!) for each message you want to send to a subscriber.
We do comb through the replies because email is an important aspect of our business, but it's a lot more work than you make it out to be. If you're just a small company sending out a monthly newsletter, I'd probably say don't bother.
Have you ever dealt with over 1000 bounce-back messages? It's as if every email server on the planet uses a different bounce-back method and message. It's terribly unpredictable.
Lots of people have done mailshots before. Is there no open-source email-bounce-rejection corpus yet?
> It's not fair to compare email campaigns to calling a company on the phone. Apples and Oranges.
Sure it is - they're both customer contact via an interactive channel. The fact that it's cheaper for them to send e-mail than to call does not imply that they should spend less money dealing with e-mail.
My time matters and a company that respects it gets my biz from one that doesn't.
And, it's not like they can't spend the money that they save on using e-mail instead of phone (or USPS mail) to buy e-mail processing software. Sure, there will be some messages that it won't handle, but it can handle the vast majority, leaving them plenty of time to handle exceptions.
I agree. Besides, a better comparison to email campaigns, instead of phone calls, is mass mailings via snail mail. I don't think people expect that the return address on the envelope is the same address to which all customer service related letters should be sent.
1) Larger companies have servers dedicated to sending out mass emails and the email address has to resolve back to the sending server properly or the spam filters kill it.
2) They need you to click the links in the email for analytics. Learning what offers get the most traction HELPS them AND YOU so they deliver relevant content in the future.
3) If you use a "support" or "sales" email as the sender and then send the mass email to 100,000 people, you are going to get 20,000 bounce-backs, littering your support email channel and support software with garbage.
4) You can't have people replying with "don't email me again" because those will get missed. Again, you can't have a large list and realistically go through all the bounce-backs looking for legitimate unsubscribe messages - the links IN the email need to be used for this.
It's not fair to compare email campaigns to calling a company on the phone. Apples and Oranges.