Writing an Email Somebody Replies To

Why replies matter more than opens

An open tells you a subject line worked. A click tells you somebody was curious.

A reply tells you somebody read it, thought about it, and cared enough to write back. That is the only one of the three that starts a conversation.

Replies also help deliverability, because mail providers treat engagement as a signal that your messages are wanted.

And for a small business, a conversation is the thing that turns into work. Broadcast rarely does on its own.

Send it from a person

The single change with the largest effect.

An email from a named person, at a real address, in the first person, reads differently from one from a company at an address nobody monitors.

People reply to people. Almost nobody replies to a business.

That means the from name is somebody's name, the signature is a person, and the reply address is one that a person reads.

A no-reply address is the clearest possible statement that responses are not wanted, and businesses use them without noticing what they are saying.

Ask one question

The mechanical part of getting a reply.

An email that asks nothing gets no reply, however interesting it was. An email asking five things gets none either, because answering feels like work.

One question, specific, answerable in a sentence. "Which of these two would be more useful to you?" or "Are you still planning that work for the autumn?"

Put it at the end, on its own line, so it is unmissable.

And make the answer easy: a choice between two options beats an open question, because it can be answered with one word.

A worked example

A supplier sending a quarterly update to about three hundred trade customers, getting almost no replies.

It was sent from the company name, contained four sections, and ended with an invitation to get in touch if we can help.

They changed it: sent from the owner's name and address, cut to one topic, and ended with a single question asking which of two product lines customers wanted more information about.

Twenty-eight people replied to the next one.

More usefully, eleven of those replies became conversations about specific jobs, several of which had nothing to do with the question asked.

The question was a door rather than a survey, which is generally what it is for.

Timing

Less important than most advice implies, and worth one decision rather than continuous optimisation.

Mid-morning on a weekday suits most business audiences, because the inbox has been cleared and the day has not filled up.

Avoid Monday mornings, when people are working through a weekend backlog and deleting quickly, and Friday afternoons, when replies get postponed to Monday and then forgotten.

Beyond that, the day matters far less than what the email says, and testing send times on a list of two hundred produces numbers too small to mean anything.

Pick a slot that suits your own week for answering replies, and keep it.

Length

Short enough that replying feels proportionate.

A long email implies a long reply, and somebody who does not have time to write one writes nothing.

Three short paragraphs and a question is about right. Anything that scrolls on a phone is starting to look like work.

Which is a discipline rather than a limitation. An email that has to fit in three paragraphs is necessarily an email about one thing, and that is usually an improvement.

The counter-case

Where replies are not what you want.

A transactional message: a receipt, a dispatch notice, a booking confirmation. Those should still come from a monitored address and they do not need a question attached.

A large list where a five percent reply rate would produce more messages than anybody can answer. Inviting replies you will not respond to is worse than not inviting them.

And announcements that genuinely require no response, where a question would be artificial.

The test is whether you would be pleased to receive fifty replies. If the honest answer is no, do not ask.

Making sure replies arrive

The failure that makes all of this pointless.

Check where replies actually go, by replying to your own email from an outside address.

Many email services default to a reply address that is not monitored, or to one that bounces, and businesses discover this months later when somebody mentions writing back and hearing nothing.

And make sure whoever receives them knows they will arrive. A burst of replies to an inbox nobody is watching is the same as no replies at all.

That check takes two minutes before sending and it is the single one most worth doing every time.

The question worth asking most often

If you only ever ask one thing, ask what they are working on or planning.

It is easy to answer, it is not a sales question, and the answers tell you what work is coming before anybody has decided who will do it.

Somebody replying that they are thinking about a project in the autumn has told you when to follow up, what it is about, and that they are open to a conversation.

That is better information than any survey and it arrives from people who chose to send it.

The variations are all similar: what is on your list this year, what have you been putting off, is there anything you are stuck on.

All of them invite somebody to describe a problem, which is the beginning of every job you will ever quote.

Answering them properly

What happens after, which decides whether it works twice.

Reply quickly, individually, and as a person rather than with a template.

Somebody who replied to a broadcast and received an obviously automated response has learned that replying is pointless, and will not do it again.

Even a short answer is enough. The point is that a real person read it.

And where a reply raises something you cannot answer immediately, say so and give a date rather than leaving it unanswered while you find out.

Building the habit

1. From a person, with their name and address.
2. One topic per email.
3. One question, at the end, on its own line.
4. Answerable in one word where possible.
5. Test where replies go before sending.
6. Answer every one within a day or two.

The sixth is the one that compounds. A list that has learned replies get answered is a list that keeps replying, and that is worth considerably more than any open rate.

What to put in the email in the first place is covered in the newsletter nobody opens.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.