Email campaigns: Best practices for "Reply To" field and managing auto-replies | Community
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A
Anonymous
October 29, 2016
Question

Email campaigns: Best practices for "Reply To" field and managing auto-replies

  • October 29, 2016
  • 1 reply
  • 3993 views

Hi - does anyone have a best practice for "reply to" field? Currently, since we don't have one person dedicated to marketing ops, I have our marketing alias as the "reply to" field, but problem is that each one of us gets auto-replies. Beside this clogging up all of our mailboxes, it also begs the question of who should update contact fields.

Ideally, was thinking that I should create an ops alias for these to flow to, and assign one person handle the flow and update in SFDC (assuming that is the single source of truth). But having multiple owners on both our MAP and CRM is proving a bit tricky.

The other question is, what if we want contacts to reply directly to the lead owner,  but don't want all of the autoreplies going to him or her? For example, we want to send emails from one of our sales reps, and give recipients the option to reply to that sales rep, but don't want them to have the inconvenience of all the bounce backs etc.

Thanks for your guidance/suggestions.

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1 reply

SanfordWhiteman
SanfordWhiteman
Level 10
October 29, 2016

You should post in Products, not here (this space is for discussions of the Champions program itself, not support questions).

If you search the Community for "reply-to" you'll see a wealth of comments on the topic, so you should start there.

I'll quickly comment on something from your last paragraph (although you'll also find this info in your search).

The other question is, what if we want contacts to reply directly to the lead owner, but don't want all of the autoreplies going to him or her? For example, we want to send emails from one of our sales reps, and give recipients the option to reply to that sales rep, but don't want them to have the inconvenience of all the bounce backs etc.

True bounces do not go to the Reply-To address. They go the envelope sender, which with standard Marketo-generated emails is neither the From: nor the Reply-To.  This is why Marketo is able to process the vast majority of nondelivery messages as events in the database.

If every SMTP server behaved according to standards, then system-generated responses like Out of Office messages would not go to the Reply-To, either -- leaving Reply-To reserved for human-generated replies only (i.e. deliberately clicking Reply or creating a new message intended to serve as a reply). 

Unfortunately, every mailserver and mail client app breaks, or allows a user to break, at least one of the would-be rules for choosing recipients. As a result, there's no way to fully insulate a sales rep who's fielding human replies from automated messages.  It's gonna happen.  IMO a good reason to use an alias that forwards to the sales rep and to mktg, as opposed to the sales rep's real address, is that it gives you a firm audit trail of the types of messages that are coming in. Marketing may not be (redundantly) patrolling the mailbox on an everyday basis, but you can inspect it as needed. (Also helps you either combat or acknowledge a claim like  "I'm getting flooded with OoO messages" instead of having to trust someone who may since have purged their inbox.)

A
Anonymous
October 31, 2016

Thanks Sanford! Will note for future. Apologies - am new to these forums.

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