OK, again, this is one of those common sense things that should go without saying. Seems though like those are the ones that get forgotten the most. And here is the real kicker, there are times when you don’t know you aren’t responding.

For example, I know a guy who was getting a lot of spam through one of his email addresses. To deal with this he just quit using that one. It was a just a forwarding address that routed anything that was sent to it into his regular email account, so he just turned it off. No harm done, right? Wrong. What about all those people who didn’t know he quit using that address and are still sending email there? “Well,” he said, “they should still have my old address so they can just send me mail there.”

Ok, but how would they know to send it there? To them you are just not responding. In many case, especially with email forwarding and such, you will not get a NDR (non-delivery response) if the email address no longer exists. So instead of the sender getting a bounce back and then trying to figure out what happened, they just don’t hear from you. We all assume that when we send an email that the person gets it. Big assumption, but we do it. So since I sent an email and I didn’t get an NDR, then you must have gotten the message and are choosing not to respond to me.

This is definitely not the way you want to be perceived. Let me suggest two ways to help combat this. First, and this really applies to the example above. Don’t change email addresses or stop using one without sending out notification, testing what happens, and then monitoring those results. In the case above, better spam filtering would have taken care of the problem.

Second, if you get in the habit of responding to all email promptly, even if that response is to say “I got your email and will give you a full response within 24 hours,” then if people don’t get a response they will no something is wrong. I am not saying do that with every little email, but the ones from people you don’t talk to regularly or the ones that are going to take you a day or two to pull the response together. With those you should acknowledge receipt of the message just so the person knows you got it and that if they don’t hear back they should follow up and not assume you have blown them off.

In a face-to-face conversation we nod, we smile, we “um-hum”, and respond other ways to let people know we are listening. Find a way to replicate that feedback loop with your emails so that your customers, your colleagues, and your friends know you are hearing what they are saying.