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Using An Email Catchall For Marketing Success?

Email. Older than dirt (in internet terms). The Universal means of communication for pretty much everyone. Whether you are an online business or strictly Brick and Mortar, email is – without a doubt – the most common method of fast communication between, well, everyone. I won’t go scouring the internet for some silly statistic on this. Anyone that has made it so far as to be reading this post already knows; it’s common sense.

What is an email catchall?

Again, the concept is easy enough that I won’t go delve into Wikipedia for some official definition. It is just how it sounds. The “catchall” is a way to send any misspelled name, or even non-existent mail address to the one of your choice. The best example I can always give is my name. Generally, I don’t even use my name as a specific address. I believe that going to specific departments is more professional (unless its’ your personal mail).

My name is Bryan, with a “y”. In my 38 years on this Earth, I have found that this is definitely the “minority” spelling. Most guys were given the “i”. And as popular as this name is in my area, the spelling “Brian” is used and abused. Just how many emails would I have missed without the catchall?

Impact on Marketing

Generally this heading would have included “Online” in front of Marketing. However, in this example, I wanted to stress the importance of Marketing as a whole. Online, offline, marketing a product, service…yourself. Tons of examples here. You want folks to know that you have a specific department that handles specific emails. For an online article submission site, editorials may go to “submissions@youre-zine.com”. For your car dealership’s service department, this may be “service@mydealership.com”.

How many times have you been in such a hurry that you may have submitted content to “submission” instead of “submissions” (no “s”)? The publisher loses a quality article, you miss a client deadline. What a catastrophe over the letter “s”? Answer? Email catchalls.

I have what I like to call “dyslexia of the fingers”. How many times I have written content (articles, posts, web content, etc.) and flipped the “i” and the “e” around, or some other common combination of two letters that happen to go oh so well together, and…I flipped the letters. For the most part, I catch this, but there have been times when I haven’t and the almighty Google Indexing Bot has beaten me to the “editorial punch.” The point is that the same thing could happen with “serivce@mydealership.com”. You see that, right? No worries…the email catchall fixed it. You have certainly saved yourself one car repair, and if you are part of the few dealerships that do honest and quality work, then you may have created a client relationship – these are terribly hard to come by.

Setting-up your email catchall

Setting-up an email catchall is easy and convenient. It is a huge time-saver as well. If you have many departments, like “sales”, “marketing”, or “support”, just set-up your catchall and the rest will be taken care of. If you’re not a website owner, often times you are able to set-up a catchall with your mail client. I think Google’s Gmail has this functionality…not really sure. I do know that it does with their “Google Apps”. If you are a website owner, most of you are probably using cPanel, as this is probably the most popular control panel for site management. cPanel, Plesk, and ISPConfig easily handle this simple task. If your web host interface doesn’t include this most basic of features, you may consider changing your web host.

There are obviously many more benefits to using an email catchall, so I’ll let your mind explore the possibilities. This post was certainly Email 101 or Marketing 101…whichever you choose. Sometimes throwing the basics out there is helpful. Go create your email catchall so you don’t miss that next sales lead!

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