These days, much of the communication which takes place with both prospective and new clients occurs via email. This includes both regular emails and online contact forms sent by email. Leaving an email query unanswered is a good way to annoy clients or worse, lose a client.
It’s possible for emails to find their way into your spam or junk folder and be completely missed.
A simple way to prevent this is to ensure you have a strategy for managing your spam email. Here are some ways you can do this:
- Check your spam folder regularly.
- If possible, configure your email program to clearly identify unread spam emails that are awaiting your review. For example, most email programs allow you to clearly indicate the total number of unread spam emails in the spam folder.
- Many email hosts allow you to adjust the aggressiveness of the spam filter.ย Check with your email host (Gmail, Rogers, Sympatico, Siteground, etc) to see if you can adjust this. You’ll need to adjust the setting such that the spam filter is flagging spam emails as accurately as possible. You want to reduce the chance of valid emails being flagged as spam while spam emails are correctly identified and directed to the spam folder.
- If you discover a valid email in spam, consider whitelisting the sender. Whitelisting an email address ensures future emails from this source will always be considered valid and never be sent to the spam folder. Again, refer to your mail host to see how this can be accomplished.
Uncompromised communication with clients and business contacts is obviously important. Let’s reduce the risk of correspondence finding its way into the spam/junk box and keep the communication channel wide open.
Great article Gilles!
Really good, Gilles! Whitelisting: learned something new today
Good to hear Lyne. Indeed, few know about this feature. ๐
Spam spam spam, wonderful spam. According to Monty Python ๐
Your article prompted me to check my spam folder, something I obviously don’t do often enough because I found 139 messages in it; 36 were valid messages from friends and family members, and one was an electronic payment from a client. I had no idea! Thank you.
I’m glad the info helped you find some valuable previously unnoticed emails Joanne ๐