How Difficult Do You Make It To Buy From You?

Sending out newsletters is a lot of fun.

For the past week, I’ve been studying out of office and error messages that email systems generate when the newsletter cannot be delivered.

Here’s one that really jumped out.

“Thank you for your email. Please do not reply to this message. The person you are trying to reach no longer works for Company ABC but your business is important to us. Your email message will be deleted with no further action, sorry for the inconvenience. We look forward to continue doing business with you.

I’m not exaggerating here. It’s what the reply said

Ouch.

Now, I understand. This was a newsletter. And I wasn’t trying to buy anything from this particular company. The unfortunate thing is, however, that the email server doesn’t know that. For all they know, I could have been about to order my annual supply of widgets.

So, for those of you who work for companies with high turnover – please make sure you put an auto-forwarding rule in place for those mailboxes that are no longer monitored by a human being. It’s simple and every mail service supports them.

The point is this. I suspect that this company, like many others, spends good amounts of money to hire the right sales reps, paying them a salary, covering their expenses and sending them to sales training every now and then. On top of that, they’ll spend money on lead generation programs to fill the pipeline.

Well, you can hire reps and buy leads until you’re blue in the face.

It’s all not going to be very useful unless you actively follow up or, as in this case, create a turnover and error-proof system so customers or prospects can contact your company.