The next tip is for everyone who sends out email, not just traffic exchange owners. If you look at the image to the left you probably already know what I'm going to be talking about today!
When I look in my inbox and see an email from Cindy, Traffic Splash, or Help Hits, I know who it's from. When I see it's from support, newsletter, admin, or even worse - noreply, I have no idea who sent it.
You want your readers to open your emails, and you want to build your brand. A really easy way to do this is by having either your name or your exchange's name in the "from" section of the emails sent out. It's way more professional, and you get noticed way more. Even if I don't open up that email I know I got one from you and know you are still kicking, so I might just go surf there.
Now I want to specifically point out Cindy Battye's email from Traffic Bunnies. Many people will say they don't know how to set it up to do the name and the email, but all she did was used her name as the email address. So now it says from cindy instead of from admin. (HelpHits did the same but used caps =P)
The real way to do it is to include both your name and email address in the from field. Not every script can be done this way. If you can't, you really should ask your programmer to update it so it does. This will ensure that all email clients properly say who the email is from.
If you can't change the name and email settings seperatly you can try putting your name and email address (with the less than < and greater than > symbols) in your script's settings as the email. It might do the trick, just make sure you use the forgot password script or something to get an email sent to you and see if it works. If not, you can do what Cindy and Michael Coursey have done and just not use admin or support as your email address =P
{ 4 comments }
Good call, tim. When setting up my email system I was concerned about deliverability, usability, and scalability.
I never even thought about that part :P
(for those reading, i am probably the no reply!)
LOL
I only just pre-empted you Tim,
I noticed I was often not getting responses to my replies to people asking for more information on my design site, when it suddenly hit me – they visited Hawkinzwebdesigns, but the answer came from ‘dehawkinz’
Now for me solving this was easy – since all my mail is actually piped to my email client via a spam service I do not actually read my email directly from the domain mailserver, and my replies are not re-routed to my domain mailserver but sent via my spam server, so I set Thunderbird (my mail client) to change my display name to Designs @ Hawkinzwebdesigns.
As yet I have not had enough of a response base to judge the effectiveness of this, but hopefully people will now ‘see’ who is emailing them :)
DeHawkinz
Traditionally, one could assume that ‘webmaster’ or ‘admin’ at any domain could be reached (with legit businesses), so I think these ‘usernames’ should not be altogether skipped. I do agree though that people should avoid sending with such accounts. I get around twenty nonspam messages each day from “admin” and it’s not the same person, so I have to run filters and searches to properly sort the messages. Considering the mass of email I receive each day, these “admins” are on the losing side – I don’t have time to figure out who they are and rarely get to actually reading the messages.
I Just changed my address on all my sites, but dont forget to also change any redirects you have in your cpanel
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