…if you don’t respond to the e-mail it generates.

I stumbled across some research yesterday that boggled my mind. It was the Hornstein Associates’ annual e-mail responsiveness survey. The 2007 survey was sent to 49 companies, including the Financial Times’ World’s Most Respected Companies and Fortune’s Most Admired Companies. The companies include: Microsoft, GE, Toyota, Coca- Cola, IBM, Wal-Mart, P&G, Apple, J&J, Costco, FedEx, Starbucks, Southwest Airlines, Berkshire Hathaway and more. Check this out, Hornstein’s research (and common sense) says that almost everyone sends an e-mail to a company at some point and that all of us expect a response within 24 hours. In 2007 only 33% of companies responded within 24 hours, down almost half from a high of 63% in 2002. Yes, you read that right. Only 3 in 10 emails are responded to within 24 hours. Companies spend hundreds, if not thousands of dollars every month driving consumers to their website and nearly 70% of the emails generated from those visits are not answered within a reasonable amount of time.

I know some of you are saying, it’s not the way it happens at our company. When I was managing a large GM dealership, I never would have believed that this is how we handled our e-mail. The first time I really looked at the numbers, we had a 33 hour average response time. On top of that, we were responding to fewer to 50% of our incoming e-mail. (there are lots of reasons for this which I will cover in part 2).  Do a little checking, you will be surprised and I don’t mean pleasantly. 

A quality SEO campaign can and will drive additional traffic to your website and that additional traffic will generate e-mails that must be answered in a timely manner. If those emails are not responded to, you will never see the benefit of SEO.

Responding to all incoming e-mail is only the first step.  Stay tuned for Part 2 where I will discuss how a poor response can be more damaging than not responding at all.