Using a noreply email address is like inviting someone into your restaurant but then not taking their order. It’s like telling someone you just baked a pie but not offering them a slice. It’s like inviting someone over but not giving them your address.
It’s annoying, and yet businesses do this every day.
They send their message from a noreply email address, but when the reader is interested and wants to reply, they can’t.
Using a noreply email address doesn’t just frustrate your customers, there is more harm it can do. We’ll go over why you should stop using it below, but first:
What is a noreply email address?
A noreply email address is an email address that can’t receive email responses. Replies to a noreply email usually receive an automated response saying the noreply email address isn’t monitored.
Businesses use noreply addresses to discourage recipients from replying to anything from customer support messages to order confirmations and email marketing campaigns.
A typical noreply email example is “[email protected]” or “[email protected]”.
Why using a noreply email is a bad idea
There are a few reasons using a noreply email address is a bad idea. Let’s have a look.
1. You’re telling your customers you don’t care
Which is more important to your business: saving time or building trust with your customers?
If you answered the latter, you shouldn’t be using noreply email addresses.
The thought of having even 4% of your subscribers reply to your emails may be overwhelming, but denying them that opportunity tells them you don’t care. It sends the message that your time is more valuable than their concerns.
Moreover, trust is built through engagement. Would you trust someone you can’t communicate with? Chances are, your customers won’t either. While it takes more time, your customers will be much more pleased with you when you make them feel heard than when you use an impersonal noreply email template to get rid of them.
2. You’re missing out on important feedback
The best way to improve your offer and come up with ideas for new products is through customer feedback. While things like market surveys and Facebook polls require a proactive approach on your part, email replies do not.
Data collected this way is basically free data.
Some of the types of feedback you’re missing out on when sending a noreply email message:
- information about a formatting error in your template that you missed.
- a heads up about a download link that doesn’t work.
- a positive comment you can use as a testimonial.
- an idea for a new product feature.
Similarly, customer questions hold a lot of content opportunities. Whether they present you with a new use-case for your product or reply with the same question each time you send out a certain offer, there is possible blog post material to gather.
3. You may be hurting your email deliverability rates
How people engage with your emails affects your email deliverability rates. So does preventing people from engaging with your emails.
Customers may stop opening your emails once they learn they can’t reply to them, which means they also stop
- reading them
- clicking links in them
- enabling the images inside them
Many Email Service Providers (ESPs) also don’t allow people to add noreply addresses to their address book (your guaranteed spot in their inbox) or, even worse, move them automatically to the spam folder. This means you may not ever reach a portion of your customers when using a noreply address.
Wouldn’t that be a shame of all those hours you poured into getting your email copy just right?
4. You lose an opportunity to keep your email list up-to-date
When you send emails from a monitored account, you’re bound to get some auto-replies and bounced email notifications back.
These are great!
While most email services will automatically remove email addresses that keep bouncing from your list, they won’t replace soon-to-be inactive addresses with new ones. So if you get an auto-reply telling you that Subscriber X changed jobs and can now be reached at “[email protected]”, you can actually update their information in your list and keep them as a subscriber.
5. You’re providing a poor customer experience
Hiver’s study shows that among customers, 39% dislike waiting for long periods of time. People are lazy. If you reach your customers in their inbox, that’s also where they want to reply to you. Especially when they’re checking their emails on their mobile devices.
Many businesses do have a contact form and even a monitored email address or other contact information displayed on their website due to corporate email security, but your customers don’t want to make the effort to go there. Chances are, they won’t even pay attention to your noreply address.
They get all excited about your new offer but have a question, so they hit reply, only to receive a noreply email message in return.
They get a little frustrated, but they still want to know more, so they go to your website. There they waste 5 minutes trying to find an actual email address, or they need to fill in your contact form twice because they missed that one of the fields was required.
Another point of frustration.
Yes, they may send you their question eventually, but their initial excitement for your product has now turned into frustration with your brand because you gave them a poor customer experience.
The same thing can happen when someone has a question about one of the transactional emails you sent them, or when a customer replies to something in your newsletter.
6. You mislead them
One of the reasons people do try to reply to a noreply address is because that “noreply” usually doesn’t appear as the sender name. Companies use their name or something related like “Company Support” for the “From” field, giving readers the impression that they can engage in one-on-one conversations while they can’t.
If you’re guilty of this, you’re also going against one of the rules of good email marketing: your sender name should match its email address. Sending a support email? Have “Company Support” as the sender name and “[email protected]” as the email address.
Great noreply email alternatives
Now that you’re convinced you shouldn’t be using noreply email addresses for your email campaigns, what should you use instead? We’ve listed a few best practices for sender names and dedicated email address formats that work well for email marketing.
1. [email protected]
While “noreply” says as much as “I don’t want to hear from you”, “hello” does the exact opposite. It’s a friendly greeting, an invitation to interact. A good sender name to use with this would be the general company name.
A more generic address and sender name are great for sending things like sales campaigns and other general marketing emails.
2. [email protected]
People connect with people. It’s much nicer to get an email from a real person than from a company or an anonymous “info@” and less intimidating to engage with as well.
You could use the name of someone on your team, that of the company’s mascot if you have one, or you could even run tests to see which name gets the best open rates.
Do make sure to include your company name in the “From” field as well. An email from “Julie” doesn’t tell your subscriber much but an email from “Julie from Mailcharts” makes it clear who it’s from while building brand recognition at the same time.
If you’re unsure when to use a personal name as the “From”, ask yourself if it’s likely that your subscriber will assume the email is automated or not. They probably won’t expect Julie to personally send out shipping confirmations or other types of notification emails.
But as with all things in email marketing, you’ll want to test what works best for your brand.
3. [email protected]
If your company operates in more formal spheres, you might be inclined to use a full name as the sender name. Don’t.
Only use your full name as your sender name (and email address) if you’re an influencer or trying to become one. That means, if you’re a celebrity, an industry thought leader, or another type of influencer whose full name is your brand.
4. [email protected]
A good rule to follow is to name your email addresses after what they’re used for. Send support emails from a separate support email address such as “[email protected]” address, your newsletter from a “[email protected]” email address, and shipping confirmations from an “[email protected]” address.
In the above cases, the accompanying sender names could be “Support at Company”, “Newsletter Title”, and “Orders at Company”.
You can also use this naming convention for different services your company offers. Wise (formerly known as Transferwise), for example, has “Wise Rate Alerts” as the sender name for the rate alerts they send out.
How to handle incoming mail
The possibility of getting replies to all of your marketing emails and transactional emails may seem daunting, but there are a few things you can do to limit the time you spend replying to individual customers.
Create a FAQ page
Many of your customers have the same questions. Gather the answers to those common questions on a FAQ page you can send them to, but make sure to always read their actual questions. Don’t just send them to a FAQ page and assume they’ll get back to you when they can’t find an answer there.
Include your support team in your email campaigns
Make sure your support agents know about it when you send marketing emails. Give them insight into your email strategy so they know when they can expect an influx of replies.
Use automated responses sparingly
Many businesses send an automated reply to any customer email they get. Usually, this reply lets the customer know the brand has received their email and includes a link to a FAQ page or the help center.
While these emails can be useful, they’re clearly automated and thus less effective in establishing trust.
Wrapping things up
Using a noreply email address is detrimental to your email marketing efforts. These types of addresses prevent customers from engaging with you when they’re most willing to do so.
When you frustrate customers like this, they may stop reading your emails, send them to their junk folder, or even hit that unsubscribe link. All of these actions can hurt your email deliverability rate and make one of your most valuable communication channels less effective.
What you want to do instead, is use a monitored, dedicated email address with a matching sender name. Sender names can be personal or not but should always include your brand name.
“Monitored” is key here, as you want to be able to receive customer responses to your emails and establish two-way communication.
Looking for more email marketing inspiration? Explore sender names and 1000s of email examples from your competitors when you sign up for MailCharts.
