Avoiding your clients’ spam bucket

This week, on three separate occasions, emails from photographers that I know and love, ended up in my spam bucket. Each person was already in my address book; we’d had many successful email exchanges-there had been no previous spam quarantines. Want to know what happened?

In each of those cases the photographer had failed to notice that their business email addresses had more than one email account User name or Reply-to name. If all your User names are consistent, the email you send from your desktop, laptop or iPhone will all safely go through; any inconsistency in your Sender address increases the risk of your message being quarantined.

Like many people, you probably have multiple email addresses. Here’s an important but subtle marketing communications question to ask yourself: Do all my business communications have EXACTLY the same From and Reply-to addresses? You probably have multiple business email addresses e.g.,  patsmith@fapbphotographer.com and patsmith@att.net and pat@fapbphotographer.com. While messages sent to you at any of those address likely end up in your in box, they are NOT the same addresses when it comes to someone else getting a message into THEIR in-box.

Why is this so important? To make your client’s life easier by using best practices within a business communication tool they still have to use.

While many of your potential clients are using social media (FaceBook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.) as a way to build business relationships, don’t forget that in the corporate world, email is far from dead.

Most people in large companies, spend many hours responding to colleagues about their multiple projects. While they are using social media for some aspects of their lives, they’re probably not using FaceBook and Twitter to handle their internal business communications. Because of the volume of work email, many adopt the habits of  “email power users.” To manage their time more effectively, they use email filters and rules. They may have initially added your email address to their address book to ensure your promos reach their in-boxes. Don’t make them have to do it again. And again. And again.

Don’t waste their time making them scan their spam folder for messages from you that have a different “From” field; they’ll then have to manually add those additional identities to your address record–unless they like keeping multiple address cards for you in their electronic address books!

Help them, help you–be considerate of their time by being consistent in your business communications.