Email auto-responders

By this point in time you’d be hard pressed to find someone who uses email and has a business on the web that is unfamiliar with auto-responders. Some may view them as a great way to seem like they’re, “on top of it” or to get out additional information to someone quickly. While there’s certainly instances where it might be a great idea to send an immediate response, there are reasons why you should think twice.

The Good

So when is it a good idea to utilize an auto-repose email? Say a customer places an order on your website and as soon as the order goes through they receive a, “thank you” message from your company. While not the traditional form, this is still an auto-response generated from your business. When a user fills out a form on your site, it can sometimes be advantageous to follow up right away with specific information (and this type of response is often programmed with the form itself). Whenever providing additional information right away might be advantageous to your customer or user then an auto-responder might be a good idea.

Another good way to utilize this type of instant response is when you will be away or out of the office for awhile. An auto-response used in this way can alert the person trying to contact you when you will be back.

The Bad

So then when is it a bad idea to use an auto-responder? Certainly to set up one just to set up one is not a very valid reason, yet I have seen this done. This is very similar to what has been happening with social media sites such as Twitter. Companies feel that setting an auto-response when receiving a direct message is a great idea, but it’s been back-firing. The whole point of personal contact with a business or individual, whether via email or on a social network, is well, personal contact. So while it may seem like a great idea to make contact quickly, if you’re not actually doing it, it might not have the desired response with the recipient.

And the Ugly …

I have actually seen companies that set auto-responders on their main contact email so that when you do contact them, every time you do, you get a canned response such as, “Thank you for contacting ABC company. Your business is very important to us ….” This begs the question, if my business were so important to ABC Company, why are they not sending me a personal response? What makes this even worse is when the response mentions something about how ABC Company will contact you and they never do. I’ve emailed several companies that seemed to really be asleep at the wheel because the only contact I ever received was the same auto-response over and over. In this type of case it’s most likely whoever originally set up the response has either left the company or no one at the company is really paying attention enough to check on whether anything like that is set up. In these, “ugly” cases the contacts are usually so annoyed they won’t ever make contact again. So before you choose to set up an auto-response, think about whether it’s truly of value, whether it might actual put-off the person trying to contact you or your business, and whether it might be better not to use it but rather check your messages and respond personally.

Related posts:

1. How not to get a potential client’s attention with email.