Having received a couple of promo mails lately made me realize just how self-centered many (brilliant) companies can be in their online marketing efforts. Every year companies spend billions just to get in contact with their customers and start a dialogue. They create surveys, focus groups, interviews, Facebook groups, live meetings, live promos, and so on and so on. Still, many do not seem to fully understand the power of sending out a simple email to their clients. Of course, in many cases their message is not read, lands in the SPAM folder, or doesn’t even reach the addressee. In other cases, however, it does reach its destination and then another problem comes into play.
Most companies use a donotreply@blabla.com address to send out messages to their customers. The crux of the matter is that why spend all that money on getting in touch with customers if one very good opportunity to get direct, immediate, and unbiased feedback is just given away? Since it is very valuable to get feedback as soon as possible after a message has been sent out this great option should not be erased. When people skim over the message they might have an idea, a complaint, or just want to say “great stuff, thanks”. For “small” things like this nobody is going to the website, looking and finally finding “customer support”, opening a ticket, then putting his message in there. If the company is not available immediately (that means: really, really immediately) for example via Twitter the feedback will be lost. Since the main idea of e.g. a Facebook group is to create a conversation why not use some more basic tools to create this dialogue? This would also prove that a company’s management understands the idea of social networks such as Facebook and doesn’t just let the student intern administer the Facebook group.
Regarding this topic there have been some great Dos and Don’ts compiled by Karen Sharf and Jeanne Jennings that are effective but also low-cost. Also, Denise Cox wrote on that matter where she wrote about the connection to social networks.
so true ^^^. The donotreply-mail-addresses used are a really strange invention!