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Email Publisher's Response Time Etiquette
By Christopher Knight

Basic email etiquette discussions are better left for last decade. In this decade, we're more concerned with giving our email clients the same or better service than we would for a client standing physically in front of us wanting to buy something.

Before we can get into a discussion on what kind of response times, follow up escalations procedures, quality control issues, and the role of email ticket tracking systems we've got to address the front door to your incoming email flow from list members, prospects & clients:

Your FROM: field and/or REPLY-TO address

There is never a good excuse for putting a dead or invalid email address in your FROM: field (also could be known as your REPLY-TO: address).

A typical reason for putting a dead account or a no-reply address in the FROM: field is because your email list management software or service provider can't process your bounces properly. Time to fire your provider and hire a new one that can handle this extremely basic process.

You must put a valid and working email address in your FROM: field. This is not a negotiable tip, but rather a "if you don't, you're going to lose out big time"…not to mention it is part of the CAN-SPAM compliance requirements that you have valid and truthful headers in your outbound emails.

What should your response time be?

Every incoming email that was triggered by your email publishing efforts should be divided up into one of these 3 categories:

1. Post campaign challenge-response emails:
   
   Process these immediately and within 30 minutes to 3 hours of every mailing.
   
   
2. Complaints or requests to be removed:
   
   Process these within 24 business hours or less. CANSPAM laws require requests to be removed to be processed within 10 days. Other countries may have different laws. If a spam complaint is not processed within 24 business hours, you must escalate the priority of getting that job done.
   
   
3. Email opportunities, suggestions or feedback, prospects or client service issues or product inquiries.
   
   Process these within 24 business hours and same business day if possible.

How do you internally guarantee response times?

If you are a solo-professional, then it's up to you to handle the response times including when you're overloaded (which might be an indication to hire a VA (Virtual Assistant) or a part/full time employee to help keep up.

If you're an entrepreneur with a small team, my recommendation to you may sound counter-intuitive at first, but hear me out. Entrepreneurs must do the same thing that enterprise level business people do to solve this problem:

Get an email ticket tracking system!

While most employees / VA's will do the job, you should never trust fully that it will get done just like you can delegate authority but never ultimate responsibility. If you're not measuring the response times on every email that your firm responds to, I guarantee that you've got a hole in your boat that needs corking.

If you're an IT guy/girl in an enterprise, you already know the secret in today's Ezine-Tips message: Get & manage an email ticket tracking system.

What is an email ticket tracking system?

Think of it as call center management software with built in rules & reporting capabilities. You setup this server-side software to process your incoming emails. It then intelligently directs each of the emails to whoever is responsible on your team for managing them.

One of the niftiest features of a ticket tracking system is the ability to setup an escalation procedure. This means that any time a particular type of email is not answered within a given time frame; the email is escalated to a supervisor or manager for attention.

Unless you are a one-person show, it's a no-brainer to get and implement a ticket tracking system. Prices range from free scripts you can get off the net to tens of thousands or even millions of dollars depending on how tied into your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems it is.

Why is it called an email "TICKET" tracking system? Because every email sent to your firm creates a ticket or a 'job' that must be closed. If 100 emails come in today, 100 tickets are created. As each ticket is handled, the ticket is closed. If you end the day with 100 tickets opened and 100 tickets closed, then you've closed the loop on ensuring that a response was really given. Whether it was quality or not is for a different topic.

NOTE: In future Ezine-Tips I'll give an overview of email ticket tracking systems that are available and a mini-review of the handful that I've used in a production environment.

Email Publisher's Response Times Summary:

Start with having a valid FROM: & REPLY-TO field in every outbound email you send. Identify your incoming emails by type so you can prioritize by target response times (including the ones required by law) and finally, setup an email ticket tracking system to manage the quality of your responses.

This Ezine-Tip was submitted By Christopher Knight -- Email List Marketing Expert, author and entrepreneur. Get your weekly dose of Email newsletter publishing, marketing, promotion, management, email-etiquette, email usability and deliverability tips by joining the free Ezine-Tips newsletter: http://www.emailuniverse.com/subscribe/.

Ezine-Tips for April 08, 2005