Email and new Social media like Google+

Well ok this seems to have nothing to do with Photography but in fact it does.
How often did you send out an E-mail and got no response ?
Well I guess many times…..
Same here.

So we decided to take a look at why, and how to solve this and found some rather disturbing facts.

Customer satisfaction?
We always try to answer mails within a day. With todays technology like smartphones, tablets etc. this is not a difficult task at hand. Let’s be honest we all have our iPhones or iPads with us “wherever” we go right?  So answering mails is often something we do in between sessions, during time off etc. And although I know I answer people it often happens that we simply never hear back…  The best to do is send another mail…… still no answer….. sound familiar?  read on.

The spamlist
Every company and consumer is using filters, and often they don’t even know it.
If I got a quarter for every time I have to ask a customer to check his/her spam folder and get the answer back “the what ?” I would be a rich man. More disturbing however is that in most cases the mails we send are indeed in that folder, with many many others much to the surprise of that customer. But it can be worse.

The blacklist
There are countless services online that register so called blacklists. Providers use these pools of IP numbers to filter the mails BEFORE they go to their customers. Overall you could say that this is a good thing, well not when you are hosted on a virtual server with more sites and ONE of that sites has send out a mass mail…. yeah you read this correctly ONE mass mail could send you straight to the blacklist on some servers, and if your clients providers uses that pool you’re doomed.

We experienced this first hand when we were hosted by our old provider, the pool our servers SMTP server was in was on several blacklists which meant that ALL our mails were blocked, delayed or simply put did not work as planned on SOME providers, but not all…. you feel the problem? How should we find out that something does not work when we are getting some responses and some not, it’s impossible.

We decided to take action and write to the blacklist providers.
Although this can be done it’s a day task, but we did it and for a little while indeed the customers that complained got our mails, but not for long, I think it lasted for 2 days. I guess the SMTP server was used for another mass mail and indeed our IP number was up there again… pfffff
In the end we just decided to switch hosting companies and went to IPS which could give us our own SMTP server part, let’s hope this improves……

So what to do?
I strongly feel that E-mail is on it’s way out, yeah I know you probably think I’m crazy, but let’s be reasonable. What do we gain from a system were you really don’t know that a message you send really got to it’s place it’s supposed to be ? Sure you can ask for a readers response but that doesn’t work in all mail programs so you will have to use a mail client that does support it, so out goes all the iPhones and iPads and probably many more.

What I tried several time is mailing the customer via the 3G network which often works.
Also using a Gmail account sometimes work, that’s why we now have a gmail, me and our own accounts. But somehow I don’t find it professional looking when you reply or send mails from a gmail account.  But for some customers it’s the only way to reach them. At the moment we don’t have a list of customers we can’t reach and customers we can because to put it simple it’s not gone work.

And even then……
This week I got a mail from a concept that I would love to join, they asked me personally to be the judge for a worldwide event that is gone start in a few weeks. My first reply was that I was interested, but immediately after I hit send I got the mail back with the message that the mail recipient did not like my IP and it had to be send from the account that it expected for Frank Doorhof… what ? huh ? I’m really me trust me….. I tried it from Gmail, I tried it from Me, I tried it from 3G, all mails came back with different errors…. well that’s a new one, I forwarded this to our new hosting company in the hope they can solve this mystery. But do imagine what would happen if I did NOT notice this error, some providers don’t send you the mail errors… I would have missed out a potential nice opportunity.

But it’s not just me, one of my models recently called me why I never respond to her mails anymore and why she was not asked for the workshops any more. Much to my surprise because I always included her in the mails to the “model pool” and never got a response from her. We decided to test it via Gmail and no response there, in the end even the Gmail ended up in her spam folder, after selecting our address as NO SPAM it worked and she is now receiving our mailing.

But that’s not all.
Most cases are solved easily by checking the mail adres from the sender, it happens often that a mail adres contains the wrong settings like info@frankdoorhof,com instead of [email protected]  or [email protected] instead of [email protected]. You could ask if those people don’t notice they get little to no mail but I guess they don’t mail a lot or are complaining that no-one returns their mails.

So what now?
It’s not all Doom and Gloom I think.
With social media we now have different options. I use twitter a lot to send out DM’s to people I really want to reach. Facebook and now Google+ are great options. I’m already organizing google+ to contain circles which I can use to send people last minute offers, reach my models and reach my students. Email will still be used of course but I’m always afraid that something goes wrong. Luckily at the moment most of the mails go through but somehow I totally lost faith in Email when something is important.

This is not helped by the simple fact that 90% of the companies you mail simply never reply back, so why don’t they reply? didn’t they get the mail? don’t they care? or did the mail get lost inside the company structure? Sometimes picking up the phone is the best way but with todays global connection system that is not always a good option, so for me…. I’m totally looking into the social media “thing” and hoping that this will be an end to email and deliver a system that is reliable. And google+ with it’s circles seems to be a stroke of genius for me.

I would like to add one small note.
It seems like our address is on the blacklist for a reason when you read this and don’t experience this yourself so I checked with our hosting company, the reply I got was rather shocking. It seems that when you send out a mailing to more than 5-10 people you already run the RISC of getting on a black list or spamlist. Their advise was to use a bulkmail program that takes care of the mails by using personalised headings and sends out the mailings one by one. I have to add that that worked like a charm. We use two mailing lists, one containing the students from the workshops which receive news updates and last minutes and one for the people abroad. Since we are using the bulkmail software we have a 50% increase in responses which is rather shocking to be honest but the truth. We just hope that the mails arrive with the people that are on the list, so when you want on that list or feel you need to be on that list but never get anything let me know and we’ll work something out.

I’m more than happy to hear your opinions about this, so feel free to comment.