Keep Out of the Customers Junk Mailbox

Keeping out of the Customers Junk Mailbox

I have one more important issue for you. Let me ask a couple of questions:

If a customer sends a support request by e-mail to your company, does he want to get an answer?

If you, in return, e-mail your customer, do you expect that your e-mail is delivered to the customer?

Chances are you answered "YES" on both questions.

After all, the customer asks for an answer, so it's normal to expect that when you send an e-mail in return, that the customer receives it.

Unfortunately, this is no longer the case. It is highly important that you get this point, so let me rephrase that: If you send an e-mail to a customer that the customer wants and expects, it may be that she never receives it!

Why is your mail not getting through?

The cause of this is the filtering of e-mail by the ISP of the customer, to prevent unwanted SPAM (unsolicited e-mail) to make its way into their mailbox. But not only genuine SPAM is filtered out. Even e-mail that the customer wants (and often expects) to receive, may be caught up in this filter. It's happening so often, there's even a term for it: "false positives".

Sometimes this stays unnoticed, because the customer doesn't get a mail telling her that it was filtered out. Or you don't get a reply from the ISP/filter that your mail didn't pass. Your "dolphin" support e-mail can essentially be caught in SPAM filter "tuna nets".

This can impact businesses on many levels:

Potential customers do not convert into real customers, because “you never responded”.
Unhappy customers as they "never get an answer on their support requests".
Unhappy Customers that don't get the info / product they paid for (download instructions for digital products are often delivered by e-mail)

When this happens, the customer usually points the finger to the business...

...YOUR business was not responsive;
...YOUR business didn't resolve the customer's issues;
...YOUR business did not deliver!

But, of course, you are not to blame. You responded! You resolved! You delivered! It's the customer's ISP that didn't deliver. An e-mail your customer wanted, and expected.

Mistakes do happen. But sometimes, ISP's and mail service businesses have no interest in righting what went wrong. And since they are not blamed, they get away with doing nothing.

What can an ISP or mail service do?

They can give their customers the possibility to "white-list". A "white-list" is a list of e-mail addresses or domains from which the customer allows mail to continue, even when the filter thinks it's "junk".

One option that's not an option is to ask customers to switch off the filter. SPAM is just too big a problem for this.

But in the mean time, this is hurting your business. And it won’t change if not by your action. So…

What can YOU do?

It’s time to point customers in the right direction. If more and more customers know where to complain if they do not get the e-mail they wanted, chances are that the ISP and/or mail service are forced into action.

So you have to educate and activate customers when they contact you:

Ask them to white-list you. If you want to see an example, check out
If they submit a form on your site, show a confirmation page telling your customer what to do if they don’t get your automated response mail within a given time span, say 30 minutes (more on this below).
If your mail is bounced because of spam, or the reason is vague, try mailing the customer through a Yahoo mail account.

There’s a lot more to this than I can explain here, but luckily,
help is on the way…

Additional helpful information

There is another company that has taken the heat for filtered mail: SiteSell. They were blamed for not delivering as promised, because their e-mail was filtered out. And they hit a wall of unresponsiveness when they tried to right this. Or was it that their requests were filtered out? :-)

As they understood how this is hurting their business, and many other businesses around the globe, they decided to take action, and point customers in the right direction when wanted e-mail doesn't make it into their mailboxes. So they created the "Deliver my mail!" initiative, which I fully support.

I invite you to join them and me. Read more about "Deliver my Mail!" on:
http://deliver-my-mail.sitesell.com/

Apply the advice they are giving, make use of the free downloadable package, and keep your mail from getting filtered… Your business may depend on it!

Free Download!

You can read each chapter of Efficient E-mail with Outlook 2003 in its entirety from any of the above links.

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Additional Microsoft Outlook 2003 Guide Sections

» SECTION 5.1 Automatic Journal Items Creation (BACK)
You can even have Outlook™ automatically record Journal items for specified activities and specified contacts.

CHAPTER 1 Let Microsoft Outlook help you manage your e-mail efficiently! (BEGIN OF GUIDE)
I wrote this guide to show you how to make full use of Microsoft Outlook 2003. The tool has so much functions to let you and your business shine, it's a shame they're not used more often.

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