AP 0803: How Do I Separate the Auto-Responses to My Emails from the Real Responses?

AskPat 803 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey what's up everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 803 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions five days a week. We have a great question today from Simone, but before we get to that I do want to thank today's sponsor which is Design Crowd.

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All right and here's today's question from Simone.

Simone: Hey Pat! It's Simone here. I run a website called Eche Music, where I help independent Christian recording artists to grow their fan bases and market better using a lot of the tools that I've been taught by yourself as well as some of your Podcast cohorts. And the information that you guys give out is priceless. It really is. So, my question is that my email list is gaining traction. I am getting great responses from people because I'm sending out content to them every week and they're really responding. So, my question is how do I separate the auto-responses, because I do get a few of those, from the real responses from people? Because I don't want those follow up questions or follow up comments to get lost in my email box because they are in there with all this other stuff like auto responses, mailing lists, subscriptions, things like that. Okay, do you have any great suggestions, tools, or anything like that? I'd appreciate it. Thank you so much for what you do. Thank you for your Podcast and yeah, for everything. Thanks. Bye.

Pat Flynn: Hey Simone. Thank you so much for the question and also the kind words and well done. Way to take action. I love to hear that your email list is taking off and you're getting responses. That is an amazing sign and I think it's very smart of you to want to make sure that you see all the responses, so that you can reply to them and you can communicate with them even more and build that trust which is obviously very, very important. So, you're of to a great start.

Now, here is what I would do. In your email service provider there is a space where you can you change the ‘reply to' email address and that ‘reply to' email address is where, when people reply to an email that you send out, where that reply goes to. I would create a brand new email address and making sure that it's still your name, but it can just be a different version or maybe with a initial at end or something. You want it to be real. You don't want it to be response@websitename or especially you don't want it to be no-reply@ that's like my biggest pet peeve when I get an email from a no-reply. That's obviously “we don't really want to talk to you anymore.” So, make it personal. Make it be a real name, but it's going to be different from the email that you use to subscribe to all those other things that you talked about because like you said, you want these things to come at you and be at a place where you can easily find them and not be mixed amongst everything else. So, why not just have a specific email address for these responses.

So, create that new email address. Have your name in there in some way, shape, or form. And make it different than your other email address. Plug it in there to your email service provider and that way all the responses that come in, you know that they're going to be just in this one spot and that way you don't have to worry about anything else. So, Hopefully that will help. That's one thing you can do.

Now, when you do send emails out? You're still going to get auto-replies from people because they might be on vacation on they might have their auto-responder on saying, “I'm out of office,” and whatnot. You can filter those out too by creating a folder or a tab or a rule. You can create rules in, for example, like Gmail. I think Outlook has these as well. So, whatever email client that you use to view these emails, you can create these rules and you can say, “Hey if an email comes in that says this string of words just mark it as red or automatically archive it.” And you can do that. So, look at the auto-responses that are coming in from people when you send an email and find the common phrases that are used there and make sure that they're quite long so that you can, you know, somebody doesn't send you an actual email that may possibly say those same things. But, then make different rules for them they say, “Hey if they say these strings of words, to automatically archive that email.” That way you won't-, you're only seeing the actual replies. And that's how I would go about it.

Simone, thank you so much for question and I want to wish you all the best. And keep up the great work please because you're doing amazing things. And I want to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your questions featured here on the show. So, thank you.

And for everybody else out there if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show, just head on over to askpat.com and you can ask right there on that page. Just ask away. We need the questions or else there's going to be no more show. So, please, askpat.com.

Now to finish up here is a quote by Buckminster Fuller. And he said, “Don't fight forces, use them.” Brilliant. Thank you so much and I'll see you in the next episode of Ask Pat. Bye. (Sneeze) Oh. Gosh. I'm gonna leave that in there.