RE: Hands-free e-mail

Two techniques to turn up the power of e-mail

by Marty Kramer   

An auto-response–like a chain saw–in the wrong hands can do plenty of damage

Setting up an automatic response to all incoming e-mail is a bad idea. You might find yourself in a situation similar to the effect you get when standing between two parallel mirrors.

Think about the following scenario: You send an e-mail to Prospect X, then shut down your computer for the night. Your e-mail triggers Prospect X’s auto-response (the one you didn’t know about) that says she’s out of town. Her "out of town" e-mail comes to your inbox, which sends your "Thanks for e-mailing, I’ll respond soon" auto-response back to Prospect X. Guess what happens when your e-mail hits her inbox? Right back at ya.

When does it end? When you open your e-mail the next morning and find 83 messages from Prospect X telling you she’s out of town. (Actually, the madness doesn’t stop until you deactivate your e-mail filter.) What kind of impression do you think you made by sending dozens of e-mails saying you will respond soon? You can run into a similar fiasco if you subscribe to a list serve to which you are able to post messages.

Even if this situation never arises, an automatic e-mail announcing that you will respond soon does not impress people. They know a computer sent the message. And they know that message has absolutely no impact on how soon they will receive a meaningful reply.

What does impress prospects? An actual response from a real person within 24 hours. With people relying so much on e-mail these days, if you don’t check your messages at least once a day, you could be missing out on important information. And if you don’t respond quickly enough, you might even lose a chance at some business.

Automatic e-mail replies can be useful, though, when set up to respond with specific information for a specific request. You can instruct people to send e-mail with a phrase or code in the subject line or body text, then set up your e-mail to reply only to incoming messages that meet those criteria. For example, include a line in an ad that says, "For more information on this listing, send an e-mail with the code BR21 in the subject line." Then set up your message rules to reply to all e-mails that have BR21 in the subject line with a message that gives the full details for that listing.

Setting up an automatic response is slightly different depending on which e-mail program you use, but all are relatively easy. You define what parameters will be searched (Subject: field, To: field, From: field, body text of the e-mail, etc.), what words to search for, and what to do if the parameters are met. Many e-mail programs call this function rules or filters. The help function in your e-mail software should give you specific instructions.

Naming your own incoming e-mail puts you in control

If you have e-mail links on your Web site (and you probably should), you can automatically fill in the subject line of incoming messages with the wording you want. This trick puts an end to e-mails with ambiguous subject lines like Request followed by ambiguous messages such as, "Please send me more info about this."

All it takes is a little extra code in mailto: links on your Web pages. If you maintain your Web site yourself, here it is:
<A HREF="mailto:name@address.com?Subject=yourheading">

When people click on the e-mail link, their default mail program will pull up an e-mail addressed to you with the subject line already filled in. The sender could erase the subject line and type in a new one, but most people don’t.

In the example above, name@address.com should be replaced with your e-mail address, and yourheading should be replaced with the words you want automatically inserted in the subject line of the e-mail.

You can couple this technique with an auto-response. For example, you could ask people to e-mail you for a list of references. You put the words Reference List into your mail link. Then, set up a message rule (based on the phrase Reference List) that automatically generates a reply e-mail with, well, your references, of course.

Photo © Corbis Images.

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