February 7th, 2010
Your Dolphin Email Caught In Spam Tuna Net?
Let me ask a couple of questions:
- If (potential) customers sends an email to your company do they want to receive an answer?
- If you in return email your customer do you expect that your email is delivered to the customer?
Well in my case I answered “YES” on both questions. After all the customer asks for an answer so it’s normal to expect that when you send an email in return that the customer receives it.
Unfortunately this is no longer the case.
It is highly important that you get this point so let me rephrase that:
If you send an email to a customer that the customer wants and expects it may be that (s)he never receives it!
I’ve investigated this issue and the cause of this is the filtering of email by the ISP of the customer to prevent unwanted SPAM (unsollicited email) to make its way into their mailbox. But not only genuine SPAM is filtered out. Even email that the customer wants (and often expects) to receive may be caught up in this filter. It’s happening so often there’s even a term for it: “false positives”.
Sometimes this stays unnoticed because the customer doesn’t get a mail telling her that it was filtered out. Or you don’t get a reply from the ISP/filter that your mail didn’t pass.
Your “dolphin” email can essentially be caught in SPAM filter “tuna nets”.
This can impact businesses on many levels:
- Potential customers do not convert into real customers because they never “heard from you”.
- Unhappy customers as they “never get an answer on their support requests”.
- Unhappy Customers that don’t get the info / product they paid for (download instructions for digital products are often delivered by email)
When this happens the customer usually points the finger to the business…
…YOUR business was not responsive;
…YOUR business didn’t resolve the customer’s issues;
…YOUR business did not deliver!
But of course you are not to blame. You responded! You resolved! you delivered! It’s the customer’s ISP that didn’t deliver. An email your customer wanted and expected.
Mistakes do happen. But sometimes ISP’s and mail service businesses have no interest in righting what went wrong. And since they are not blamed they get away with doing nothing. But in the mean time your and my business is hurt by this.
So it is time to point customers in the right direction. If more and more customers know where to complain if they do not get the email they wanted chances are that the ISP and/or mail service are forced into action.
There’s a lot an ISP or mail service can do. Customers should have the possibility to “whitelist” you. A “whitelist” is a list of email addresses or domains from which the customer allows mail to continue even when the filter thinks it’s “junk”. One option that’s not an option is to ask customers to switch off the filter. SPAM is just too big a problem for this.
Another company that have taken the heat for filtered mail is SiteSell. They’re blamed for not delivering as promissed because their email was filtered out. And they hit a wall of unresponsiveness when they tried to right this. Or was it that their requests were filtered out? 
As they understood how this is hurting their business and many other businesses around the globe they decided to take action and point customers in the right direction when wanted email doesn’t make it into their mailboxes. So they created the “Deliver my mail!” initiative which I fully support.
I invite you to join them and me. Read more about “Deliver my Mail!” on: http://delivermymail.sitesell.com/sls.html
Let’s take a stand and educate customers on what to do if they do not receive email they really wanted to get. Let customers demand:”DELIVER MY MAIL!”
About the writer:
Erwin Steneker is a senior support consultant with over 13 years of experience in both sales and IT support. Check out his website at http://www.customerservicepoint.com/
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Posted in Business