Startup stupidity: the no-reply email address
Taken from my blog. In an effort to share more common sense advice with early stage startups, allow me to introduce Startup Stupidity. A new series of short features focused on common silly mistakes startups make, and how you can avoid them.
First up. The no-reply email address. No-reply email addresses are a frustration of mine, whatever the business stage. They are in place to create friction for the recipient by making it harder to reply easily.
They are outrageous in the context of early stage startups.
Early stage startups live or die on user feedback and first customers. Making it hard for recipients to reply is a gold-class standard of stupidity.
Any extra friction could prevent a critical user pain being understood, or a first customer signing up.
Worse, recipients will infer that you're not fussed about hearing from them, which unless you're not very good at the whole startup thing, is almost certainly not the case.
Marketing is nothing without a meaningful and hard-earned connection to your real buyers.
Say no, to no-reply.
What are your views on the no-reply email address?
Post: https://www.roastmylandingpage.com/blog/no-reply-email
Great point! Do you have any examples of how removing a no-reply address has resulted in reduced churn, increased feedback, or some other benefit for a company?
Having a no reply email address means that you don't care about customer support. Simple as that.
I believe that everything should be able to be replied to. Marketing emails, transactional emails, password reset emails, etc.
Besides, why pass up on potentially valuable feedback? If a customer is making the effort to reply to you, you better damn well be able to accept it.
Completely agree. Using a no-reply email is like to say to customers "don't reply to us, we don't care about you"
(I guess that's why google is using no-reply address, but not Apple....all about customers)
I have always felt that no-reply addresses are not really no-reply addresses. They still monitor the inbox but decide not to reply. Also, I don't see why a business should have them.
This. Excatly this! I am so fed up too with those customer annoying stuff. Best paired with no contact info on their sites too.
Customer Service is one key where small companies cna be outsmart the big ones. Be there, be friendly, be reliable and make it easy for your customers to contact you.
For marketing emails, definitely 'no reply' is a strange choice.
However, for in-app transaction messages, they are highly recommended in a lot of cases. To give you an example, our HR app allows admins/managers to send internal reminder and other emails to their employees.
Because of all the anti spam rules around emails these days, we HAVE to have those emails coming from our hrpartner.io domain. So what we used to have was '[email protected]' as the 'from' header in the email, and the company admin email as the 'reply to' address (different domain belonging to the customer).
Now, it turns out that while this gives us a higher 'no spam' rating from most email servers, most email clients out there don't seem to respect this, and send replies to the 'from' address instead of the 'reply to' address.
So we ended up getting several highly sensitive email replies from customer's employees coming into our main admin email address. We've had to change that 'from' address to '[email protected]' and ensure that it goes into a black hole now in order to preserve privacy and security.
Yes, can confirm this as well. Some automated systems such as zendesk also don't respect the reply-to address and will reply to the sender. I think Oliver's point still stands since in most cases, even most transactional email this doesn't apply.
Good one! I'm not really sure what makes people go with a no-reply address, as I believe it involves even more work setting up than using an existing email address. Maybe it's just something which is lingering from the past.
Great tip @olly. I totally agree that early stage startups thrive on initial user feedback. The need to interact and communicate with those early customers sets the foundation for the business as it grows. Great reminder!
Great post. Sam Parr from The Hustle has said many times that he has gotten leads from emailing the "info@---" email address and has discussed how valuable it can be when somebody is on the other end.
Looking forward to this series.