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Has someone researched the amount of recipients who respond to newsletter emails, and see "Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently"? -The ratio is probably high.

People who reply generally have an interest in your product, but need further convincing. You're losing potential customers by ignoring their questions!

What are your thoughts?

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5 Answers 5

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It is always my suggestion to clients to use authenticated emails when sending their campaigns. The email still may be FROM [email protected] but it reduces failures and prevents blacklisting of their actual email server.

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    +1, it's always easier to press the reply button than clicking some obscure link in the message body to contact the mail sender
    – Quamis
    May 12, 2011 at 11:02
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I guess the main reason is that you don't have to filter auto-replies from real replies manually.*

For a better UX you should always include a prominent reply email link/address in your newsletter message.

*Note: This is only relevant for "out of office"-style messages, error messages (delivery failed etc.) should be handled by a bounce manager.

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5 reasons of why use fake emails

  • Most emails from mail marketing are from some automatic tool or 3rd provider. These tools sometimes do not have easy way to configure a nice reply e-mail or who use do not know why
  • Reply e-mail is used by algorithms to define if one email should be considered spam or not. Reply/send email and title are most simple way to set a spam filter, but in practice good spam filter should consider more than this
  • The reply email will start to receive spam. Sometimes a very large amounts of spam.
  • Sometimes, in special for sites that send too much email, reply emails already are configured on spam filters and will be just discarded. New fake emails solve this.
  • Domain of reply emails and direct links to a site can impact on SEO to make your domain blacklisted. One client reported that on past, before know me, get out from fist page of Google after send 300.000 unsolicited email.

At the end, for UX is good have a nice and simple reply e-mail, but in practice, in special for old or services that users prefer use set as spam instead of unsubscribe, is very hard to you convince your client to use a nice reply email, because you will need to choose between or email have a nice reply email or the email really go to inbox of destiny. This depends of your client, is not for everyone. For new clients, I recomend that you try to convice use a nice reply email if this service is nice.

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Probably because that is not the objective of that specific newsletter. It might be relevant to have a real email address if you have a relative small amount of subscribers, but if you have tens of thousands, that can be really tricky.

Moreover, the purpose of the newsletter is to get the people from their email inbox to your website and let them follow the normal client process. Having to answer people directly can prove to be an effort that is not profitable.

If the newsletter is done correctly, it should be clear for the subscribers what he has to do next and where to go if he needs more information.

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You are absolutely correct. All online communications from an entity should have some form of human responding. Why don't they? Shortsightedness...budget over UX...all sorts of reasons, really...none of them GOOD reasons.

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