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Learned this one the hard way today, and want to share with the community.

  • Email auto-replies ignore the “Reply To” and auto-reply to the Sender Email Address (“From” address)
  • If sending from a VP, C-Suite, or other member of leadership, it’s best practice to use a fake or “catch-all” email address instead of their real email address in the From Address field.

 

Why is this important?

  1. Your leadership member will have their inbox full of Out of Office auto-replies
  2. Customers will leverage the real email address from the leader, by forwarding or manually adjusting the recipient of the email (ignoring the reply-to setting and manually changing it to the VP/C-suite member)

Learn from my mistakes on your future JO programs that will leverage a member of leadership!

To add on -

  • If you want customers to be able to respond to that person, BUT don’t want them to get bombarded with all the out of office messages, we like to give them a heads up and then, work with their executive assistant (or them) to set up email filters to send all those emails somewhere else.
  • Consider sending the email from someone else if possible (i.e. we often send from VPs or Customer Advocacy team members instead.)

Good best practices @sarahmiracle and @heather_hansen! I used to see this when I was at another organization that used Constant Contact for mass emails. Auto replies wouldn’t go to the reply-to address all of the time. Your suggestions for ghost emails from execs are spot on! Thanks for sharing.

@SeanDonnelly can you give a high level explanation of what a “ghost email” is? After my lesson learned today, I’ve heard this, but I’m not sure what I need to do to implement one at our org. 

@sarahmiracle By “ghost email,” I mean an email that you construct and send on behalf of someone else. It looks like the email is coming from one of your executives, a CSM, or anyone other than yourself or a generic entity. It’s like ghost writing an article for someone. 

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