Susan Oakes of M4B Marketing brought up a really good point today. Responding to comment forms and emails is essential to your business’ reputation. The reason – nobody likes feeling like they are being ignored.
It isn’t a good feeling being ignored and you just never know if the ones you ignored might be the ones you need in the future.
I have had negative experiences like this before. You contact someone via their own custom contact form and then you never hear back from them. At that point, they’ve lost my business instantly.
Ignoring emails and correspondence gives the impression that if they can’t handle contact requests, then how do they handle customer orders? It immediately puts a sour taste in people’s mouths. I don’t want to give a business my money when they can’t even answer one email.
So my question is, how do you tackle all of the emails in your inbox in a timely manner without giving the impression that you can’t be bothered?
We look at it this way, it you do exactly as you’ve said and don’t respond in a timely manner then you’ve told the person you don’t care. And worse, they’re free to go to one of your competitors. We try very hard to respond to people right away, like within minutes. That gives our customers the feeling that we are there for them, ready to help at any moment. It’s not easy, but it’s worth it.
Thanks for linking to my article Amanda. It is interesting that on one hand owners are complaining about all the emails and on the other say they have difficulty attracting customers.
I once read a report done by InsideSales.com & MIT on lead response times which showed the following:
“The odds of contacting a lead if called in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop 100 times. The odds of qualifying a lead if called in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop 21 times.”
If this isn’t reason enough to not only get back to them, but get back to them right away, I don’t know what is. You can find the full study at http://www.leadresponsemanagement.org/mit_study