Here’s the gist of this journal:
Stop using your no-reply email address!
Now that this is out of the way, I’ll do the explaining!
Although no-reply emails are widely used by a lot of companies and organisations around the world, it doesn’t mean that using them are of any real benefit to you or your company.
No-reply email addresses decrease the success rate of email campaigns and, in the long run, affect the reputation of your company.
Before we dive into the juicy details of why you should say NO to no-reply email addresses, there’s one more band aid I need to take off real quick; if your inbox has a few replies from customers, that’s okay. Don’t complain too much about it!
Don’t worry, though, we won’t just leave you hanging, not knowing what to replace this email address with, because we’re also going to suggest what you can do instead.
What is a No-Reply Email Address?
A no-reply email is an email address that uses the format “noreply@yourwebsite.com.”
If you open your inbox right now, we’re pretty sure you’ll find at least a couple of emails from no-reply emails, because the majority of companies use this email address format to send marketing emails, transactional emails, or shipping information. They resort to this email address simply because they don’t want their inbox full of unnecessary replies.
Honestly, I see their point. I mean who needs to have their inbox full of emails they don’t want to read or reply to! But that’s where you make the choice between “Do I want to receive these emails, and find a way to reply to them in very little time with very little effort, or do I want to piss off my customers?”
So, it’s a matter of choice and perspective. From a client’s point of view, not being allowed to reply to an email when you have an important question, might be annoying and offensive. On the other hand, the organisations using no-reply emails are really happy with their email campaigns. The way they see it is that they’ve finally launched the email campaign they’ve been preparing for, and to top it all, they won’t be annoyed with loads of replies and questions.
They think they’ve launched that email campaign successfully, but did they really?
Why You Should Never Use a No-Reply Email Address
What’s the one thing that pops into your head when you see the email address in your inbox is a no-reply email address?
One way it can be seen is “We’re not talking to you, you’re just another ID on our CRM and we had to send you this email.” Another way is “I don’t care about what you’ll tell me, but I have a few things to tell you.” There’s also a third way this can be seen, which is, “No matter how valuable what you want to tell us is, we don’t want to hear it.”
Technically speaking, there are many more ways this email address can make your customers feel, but they’re all an echo to what we’ve suggested above, and it all cuts the communication with your customer.
The fact that you’re cutting the two way communication between you and your customer, can hurt your entire organisation. We’ll tell you in detail how the no-reply email address is devastating your efforts.
1. Successful Email Delivery Rate and No-Reply Emails Don’t Mix
I’m a copywriter here at JAYPAY and I know what it takes to prepare an email campaign. It means spending hours perfecting the design, writing and rewriting the content, thinking about a captivating subject, adding a preheader that not a lot of people understand how valuable it is, meticulously choosing the right word to create a CTA that no one would miss clicking, and the list goes on. And when you use a no-reply email address, emails don’t reach a big number of the subscribers!
So, you can’t expect the marketing team to be okay with that! No, that’s something my little heart simply won’t accept.
No-reply email addresses don’t seem trustworthy. Actually, they seem spammy, and email providers, such as Gmail and Outlook, have created filters to block out emails that are spam.
Do you see where I’m going with this?
Using a no-reply email address increases the chances of your email to be caught in a spam filter, which results in your subscribers not reading the emails, your email campaign to be a failure, and your marketing team to cry over the long hours of dedicated work that went to waste.
That’s why we don’t have a noreply@jaypayagency.com email address; we love our team too much to do this to them! We know the number of hours that are put to perfect our email campaigns. Starting with how we choose our words to ensure that none of our emails get caught in any spam filters. At the end of the day, it’s all about choosing the right words to market your product correctly.
2. No-Reply Emails and Customer Frustration Walk Hand-in-Hand
So, now that we know for a fact that no-reply emails have a very high chance of getting lost, which devastates your marketing team, let us also tell you that when these emails actually arrive in your customers’ inbox, they’re also pissing off your readers!
It seems like these no-reply emails hurt everything they touch, doesn’t it? And organisations are still attracted to them like a moth to a flame!
I’ll never understand this toxic relationship.
No-reply emails are frustrating because, well, clearly customers can’t reply to them.
Just imagine this scenario, you have a chocolate factory, and you’re sending a Christmas email to let your customers know that this year, the Christmas offers are incredible. Then you ask your customers to pass by your store to check out what these offers are.
Did I mention that your email subject was “Santa’s going Loco over our Choco”? Because your brand is called Loco Choco!
If someone actually has a chocolate brand called Loco Choco, I promise you I don’t know about them, and I won’t look them up because I don’t want to change my example.
Also, dear Loco Choco, if you’re reading this, I’d really appreciate you sending me some chocolates this Christmas. Oh, and stop using your no-reply email address!
Unfortunately, you’re sending this email from noreply@locochoco.com.
And one of your very loyal customers was out of town, so they couldn’t pass by the store, but they wanted to know more details about the offer.
Since you’re sending out the email from the no-reply email address, this customer can’t ask you!
Just talking about this makes me feel how frustrated your customer is.
Little did you know that this customer did click on the reply button, and wrote you very loving Christmas wishes for you and your family, then asked about more details about the Christmas offers at Loco Choco, but when they clicked send, the email couldn’t be sent. Two seconds later, they got a “cannot deliver” notification. Or worse, they received an impersonal email stating that the email box isn’t monitored.
That’s what a no-reply email address does.
Let that sink in!
Now your customer is frustrated, you got one less Christmas wish for 2021, and chances are, they’re not going to pass by your store to buy the chocolate. Obviously, if you’re going to make your customer go through Olympic hoops, they’ll just drop you and go to the next place that provides what you provide, while giving them peace of mind. As we always say here at JAYPAY, patience is dead. We actually have an entire podcast about that. You can check it out here.
The communication was lost, and honestly, if brands can’t communicate with customers, then their branding is missing something, scratch that, they’re missing the entire essence of branding. I won’t dwell on this topic either, but you can check out this JAYPAY podcast about branding.
One more reason to make the customers hate no-reply emails is that they can’t add that email address to their address book.
If you still want to defend the no-reply email address and say that no one even cares about address books anymore, you’re right. But let me also remind you that adding email addresses to address books isn’t only about your customers, but it also prevents your emails from going to spam.
Which brings us back to the first point we made, no-reply email addresses mostly end up not being delivered.
It’s a vicious cycle.
There Are Many Options Other Than No-Reply Email Addresses
Now that we’ve identified some of the problems no-reply emails could leave you with, yes, trust me there are more, it’s time to give you some suggestions. If you’re not going to use your no-reply email address, what will you use instead? How will you reply to the responses in your inbox without having to spend a lot of time, you don’t have in the first place, to make sure none of your customers are left with no reply?
1. Change that No-Reply Email Address into a Real One
As an organisation, you can specify one personal email to take care of these marketing campaigns, transactional emails, or receipt emails. It could be the email of one of the employees in your sales or communications team.
Another option, which is the one we prefer here at JAYPAY, is to create an email address specifically for these kinds of emails. We like to use hello@jaypayagency.com, which is not only a nonpersonal email address, but it also gives the reader a sense of comfort.
You can create your own hello@domainname.com email, a pleasereply@domainname.com, letschat@domainname.com or even a marketing@domainname.com.
However, if you don’t want to create yet another email for your organisation, although one additional email won’t hurt, you can simply segregate your emails, between support@domainname.com and billing@domainname.com.
That way, you’ll send your marketing emails from your support email address, and transactional emails from your billing email.
For those of you using info@domainname.com, we have some breaking news, this email address is also a bad choice for your organisation. Stay on the lookout for our upcoming journal posts, because soon we’ll tell you why you shouldn’t use info email addresses in one of these journal.
2. Use Tools to Segregate the Responses in Your Email
You can always redirect emails from one inbox to another! So, let’s say you started using hello@domainname.com, you can set up the replies in a way that specific keywords redirect the replies into another inbox.
Here in JAYPAY, we redirect the emails we receive on hello@jaypayagency.com to me and the rest of the Communications Team, if they have keywords such as “written content, landing page content, content for emails,” and the likes. Whereas the emails that have key words such as “visuals, logo, and design” to name a few, are redirected to the inbox of our head of the Visuals Team.
That way, we ensure that all of our customers are getting the replies they need from the specialist.
Another idea you can do is create an autoresponder which informs your customer that you’ll get back to them within the next 24 hours. That way, the employee taking care of the hello@domainname.com email has enough time to check all the messages in the inbox, create the most fitting replies after consulting the specialists, and you wouldn’t have left your customers hanging until you get back to them.
That’s the thing about emails, it’s a two way communication method, so don’t try to change it in your email campaign which highly relies on communication.
The Final Word
It’s true that a no-reply email address can ensure you have a much cleaner inbox, but at what cost? No-reply emails are a complete no-no, because they devastate your email deliverability, frustrate your customers, and harm your organisation as an entity.
When you stop using no-reply email addresses, your email efficacy will multiply, your customers won’t be frustrated, and your marketing team won’t ever feel like their efforts went to waste.
Who knows, if you stop using your no-reply email address, you might get one additional Christmas wish like Loco Choco would have!
Be mindful of your email campaigns, because if they’re done right, they can push your brand into building a tight customer-business relationship that can enhance your marketing efforts and reach. If you need any help with perfecting your email campaigns, we’re here for you.