Moments after I booked my hotel from Hotels.com for the Email Insider Summit (plug) in Park City, Utah, I received an email from donotreply.
Had my purchase not been top of mind, I probably would have marked this email as spam. Who the heck is “donotreply?” Why not keep it simple and use the brand that I know – Hotels.com? It is too bad that Hotels.com ignored this simple step.
Also, the subject line read, “Hotel Booking Confirmation.” Again, considering I had just purchased, the subject was relevant to me. However, it seems like a missed opportunity to use the Hotels.com brand to personalize based on my destination, date of travel, etc.
The good news is that the Hotels.com did a great job on the copy of the email. It rendered nicely with images off and images on and provided detailed booking/receipt information.
After reading this email from Hotels.com, I did a quick search in my Gmail account for “donotreply.” To my dismay, I found another example of this terrible from name from Chipotle.
Additionally, a well-known brand – Vonage – used “donotreply@vonage.com” as their from address.
As many studies have shown, one of the two most important factors in the subscriber open decision is from name (subject line being the other). Why not spend the extra few seconds to ensure that your from name is not “donotreply?” Take the “extra” step and make the from name your company name or brand.
Think about it in terms of an old school letter. Imagine if you received a snail mail letter like the one below. Do you open it?
I often hear marketers talking about the silver bullet of email marketing, the next wizbang that lead to crazy high open rates and conversions. Let’s first make sure we have the basics down. It’s time to start tackling some of the easy stuff – the “low hanging fruit” as my old boss says.
DJ Waldow
Director of Best Practices & Deliverability at Bronto
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So funny, yet so sad that major companies could have missed such an important detail, possibly in an attempt to avoid extra support effort by looking at replies to the email address. I have to admit the post subject line definitely caught my attention though. In a “What the…” sort of way though…
Brian Whalley
Community Manager
OurStage.com
Brian, I agree, this is often done because people don’t want to monitor replies. It’s not hard to set a reply to though, or even add a name to the do no reply address.
I’m glad you liked the subject line, I thought it was a nice twist ;)
Or what is worse DJ is when you reply and ask for information – things go into a black hole.
@Brian: Glad that the post title caught your attention. It was a suggestion by @covati after a tweet for help – http://twitter.com/djwaldow/status/1016524638
@Sundeep: Excellent point/addition. I should have mentioned that directly in the post. That could be another topic altogether.
dj