MARKETING BENEFITS OF USING A
CATCH ALL EMAIL ADDRESS
CATCH ALL EMAIL ADDRESSES EXPLAINED
A catch all email address is a very powerful marketing tool that comes along with owning your own domain, and as the name says, it catches all. This is a very technical issue that is simple to implement and easy to use with just a little planning and an understanding of what a catch all email address can do.
An email address is divided into three distinct parts,
YOURNAME@DOMAIN
the first part (RED) is the user name on your mail server
The second part (BLUE) is the postal indicator
the third part (YELLOW) is your domain
Each active email address that a company uses is registered as a user with their mail server, and is set up by either the web design team, the internal IT division or a person appointed by the company to manage their email issues. A catch all email address is a specific email address, which has been given special privileges and user rights on your mail server , and will as such receive all emails that are addressed to any non registered email user within your domain.
Many large email providers ensure that all unrouted emails are sent directly to the BLACK HOLE (Deleted) as there would be an awful lot of unrouted emails. How ever most companies that sell products and services to the public are small and have a low level of unrouted email.
So a catch all email address is an email address that receives all email addressed to every unregistered username on your company email server.
The next issue to consider once you have a catch all email address set up is, how are you going to manage your catch all email address, and who will be responsible to ensure that all received emails are dealt with in the appropriate manner.
A catch all email address works best when you apply a #FUFISM based marketing strategy.
Your email service provider has already set up spam filters that will eliminate a large percentage of SPAM , and these include such things as the marketing of porn sites and the sale of VIAGRA as well as some pay day loan offers that arrive by email.
You will need to set up filters to further sort out spam from customer interactions, automatically forwarding engagement emails to the correct employee's email address, then deleting detected spam, and following up with human inspection of the remaining emails to determine if they should be deleted or acted upon.
The marketing power of a catch all email address is not at first self evident, as it really comes to play in evaluating the ROI (Return On Investment) of individual marketing campaigns. Imagine giving each marketing campaign it's own individual specific email address, and having stats on which email address was used to convert prospects to customers, along with where each email address was displayed or used.
How to set up a marketing campaign using a catch all email address
Create the content for your marketing campaign as per standard practice for your company / organisation .In the call to action statement ensure that you are requesting a response by email. Choose an email address that will have some meaning to your target market audience, and ensure that this email address is not registered with your email server as a user.
An example here would be seo4u2use@info4u.co.za if you were selling Search Engine Optimisation Services and your domain was Info4u.co.za.
Be sure to check with the person who reads the catch all email that they have re-routed (forwarded) the email address chosen for this campaign to the relevant person, and do a physical check by sending mail to the specified address and ensuring that it is received by the correct person before you allow your web design team, your blogger or your social media staff to publish the content that you have created as part of this specific marketing campaign.
Once you have a few campaigns running you will soon be able to see which ones are working and which are not working by evaluating the information flow patterns to each separate email address. The beauty of using this trick with a catch all email address is that you do not need to create a new user on your email server for each new campaign, then go through the rigmarole of setting this email account up on an individuals PC or laptop. All you need to do is ensure that the filters on the catch all email address are functioning correctly and that email sent to the campaign specific email address is re-routed (Forwarded) to the correct person, or persons within your team.
There are many other benefits that come along with a catch all email address, as it can be used in many ways to do a host of different Public relations things, like when you do an email survey, having the email address read product.survey@info4u.co.za where product.survey is relevant to the end user and their interests thus this will elicit a trust factor and hopefully get better responses.
Another strange benefit of a catch all email address comes into play when people know your domain, but do not know any specific email address at your domain and they thus use a pot luck email address like help@info4u.co.za or ceo@info4u.co.za which your staff who manage the catch all email address will be able to re-route to the correct person within your company or organisation.
The marketing benefits of using a catch all email address are not easily recognized, as these are hidden in the technical notes of the mail server architecture and the technical staff do not get along so well with the marketing staff at most places where I have worked. This means that the technical details and marketing value of a catch all email address is not discussed with your marketing team, and thus most marketers that I have spoken to do not even know that such a thing as a catch all email address actually exists.
The ability to have many different email addresses that each refer to a position within your staff is a very powerful tool when used on the contact us page, as this creates the illusion that you are a large, well structured and organised business. When a potential prospect takes the time to write to more than one member of your management team, as many people do, and gets personalised replies from each email that he / she sent the trust factor is elevated considerably.
Making use of a catch all email address is as simple as teaching a person how to set up a system to re-route emails to the correct person within your organisation, as well as establishing a set of filters that automatically forward emails to designated email addresses to the correct active email address.
