I tried to reply to one of the emails they send each day. And I quickly discovered they send these using a no-reply address. Meaning I COULDN’T reply.

And that broke my brain. This is a company which is all about web 2.0 and the new communication mechanisms available. Yet they have broken the single most used communication process of the internet!!! Why would they do this? People have been sending and replying to emails for decades now. Decades. And it works.

Email replies are free feedback

Letting your customers reply to the emails you sent is like getting free feedback. I don’t know about you, but I LOVE talking with my email marketing customers. I get specific feedback on what they’re looking for, the problems they’re trying to solve, and their business situation. All of that is incredibly useful for me in creating new features and marketing my service.

I would never, ever think of breaking the reply-to of my email newsletter or the welcome emails my system sends when people sign up. NEVER. In fact, I explicitly state that they can simply reply to the confirmation email if they have any questions. Sometimes they do.

And here’s a really important metric. The people that reply to that confirmation email (when they sign up) almost ALWAYS become customers. Why? Because they ask some questions and I reply directly to each of their questions. And then BOOM, they purchase my service.

For me, having people purchase my product is pretty important. And if answering a few emails is all it takes to make a sale, then hell, email away. So why do some small businesses disable the reply-to?

You’re Not That Big

I think small companies look to big companies for how they should do things. They see Amazaon.com or some other big web based business breaking the reply-to and they think “well, this is what the big guys do, so maye I should as well.” At least that is what I’m guessing.

But you’re not that big. Even if you are HUGE, with millions of customers, you should still not break the reply-to, which I’ll explain later.

So, you’re a small web based business. Please, do NOT do what the big lazy businesses do. You should be extremely happy anytime anyone sends you an email.

Dialogue is the best way to get business and email is the easiest way to start a dialogue with a customer.

You should be encouraging replies, not breaking them with a no-reply email.

Even if you ARE big, don’t be Lazy

Any business that sends emails from a no-reply address is either stupid or lazy (or both.)

Before you start ranting about the volume of emails that they send and the cost of processing all those inbound emails, lemme just point out that I’m not stupid (although I am lazy) and I’m also a bit of a programmer.

So, how do you handle all these inbound emails if you can’t have a person or people replying to each of them?

Simple. First, you have software parse the incoming email looking for questions. You run those questions through software which attempts to find items in a knowledge base which address your question. Trouble ticket software does this already. So, if you have a trouble ticket system, you could route these incoming replies into that system. Most of them have email gateways.

Also, smart software would differentiate between emails that have short questions and emails that have multiple paragraphs. Short questions can have an auto response back with links to the knowledge base based on the software’s analysis of the question – exactly like the fancy trouble ticket systems in use today. Long replies (whatever you define as long) are probably worth reading by a person. So you can route those to a real person.

OR, if you’re really cool, you could use the Mechanical Turk to tag those emails and then have software route those emails based on the human tagging of the Turk.

See what I’m getting at?

Don’t be lazy. And don’t be stupid. Be Smart. Email replies are golden. They come from current or potential customers. Let me say that again.

Email replies come from current or potential customers.

And if customers are important to you, then treat these emails according to the value they could provide.

Plus notation. It’s super handy. I also like using it for my own testing when I need to enter in a bazillion email addresses. I can use f00+1@, foo+2@, foo+3@ and they’ll all work (no, not with foo) and they’ll all appear as unique (should they?).

I like that the email spec allows the plus sign.

What I don’t like

Yet for some reason, most email “validation” code rejects an address with a plus sign. And this sucks for 2 reasons.

1. It doesn’t let me do what I want to do which is to use a perfectly valid address while signing up on some other companies web site. Sometimes I simply go away. Too bad for them.
2. It shows a lack of caring and understanding by the programmer.

Copy/Paste with no understanding

I’m not really sure, but I THINK what people are trying to do is help their users out. I’m pretty sure the same regular expression is copied and pasted over and over with the same error.

STOP IT.

Just validate that the user entered something like f-+5-,.o.ooo@foo.fooooo and you’re done – let them use whatever characters they want.

… the only way to reliably determine whether an address can actually receive e-mail is to send a test message. (wiki)

Oh, and another place this pops up is when people pass the email address in the querystring and then try to lookup the subscriber based on this value. Ooops! Typically the plus sign isn’t encoded and the lookup fails and the subscriber isn’t found and he isn’t happy and then he ends up blogging about it.