When you set up a mailing to go out to users that are registered for a service or newsletter you inevitably have to choose from what e-mail address you want to send it from.
Previously, we grew accustomed to seeing mailings come from these addresses, which is why many still opt for this. Stop doing it. Read on to learn why.
Why don’t you want a reply?
Let’s say you send out a newsletter and choose to do that from a no-reply address, what signal are you sending? That you don’t want to hear from your customer. Think about that for a moment and answer the question above: Why don’t you want a reply?
For some notification type emails, this may very well be justified, but for many type of emails, you actually would love to hear from your customers or make sure they contact you if they have any problems.
Making it easy for the user
Offering customers the ability to just respond to the email with any questions they might have is a far superior user experience than reading your email, realizing they have a question and having to go look up ways to contact you.
Technology cannot be blamed either. It is simple and cheap to set up aliases, email addresses and routing rules. You shouldn’t need to be sending things from a no-reply address, unless it actually makes sense not to encourage easy communication between you and your user.
Setting the “Reply To” parameter
While I still believe that the to address should be something that actually exists, another way to very easily make sure replies end up in another inbox than where the mailing came from, is by setting the reply to parameter.
As an example, I’m sending a service notification from [email protected] but would like replies to go into the support system hooked to [email protected]. Setting the latter as reply to makes this very simple, without need for a more complex setup.
Summing it all up: Just don’t.
If you are thinking about using a no-reply email address, think again. And again. Only if there is truly an excellent reason to hinder customers from contacting you, use it. Most of the time however, such a reason doesn’t really exist.
