Intelligent AutoResponding

How to auto-respond ONLY to dead leads?

[Mardi_Gras]

When e-mail inquiries come in for my rental homes, we respond immediately with an information packet (no autoresponder - we do it by hand - but that could change).

Probably 25% of the people who get a packet e-mail back, and we either get a booking or we don't. But at least we know where they stand.

The rest, we never hear from. They probably are put off by the price, the location, or they were just shopping. But maybe a few of them just need some coaxing.

It isn't easy to go back and send follow-up letters manually to these leads, knowing that in probably 19 out of 20 cases they are "dead." But if I could save one in 20 of those dead leads by using an auto-responder, it might be worth the time and money.

Here is the problem. It would seem silly to send an e-mail to someone who has booked a home from us for a week saying "We haven't heard from you..." So I only want to auto-respond to those who DID NOT follow up after my initial e-mail. Any suggestions on how to do that?

Thanks.

[ytswy]

How about using some email rules like this on the email address you use for customer contact. (note: based on MS Entourage on a Mac, but I assume most mail programs have equivilents):

Rule 1. If sender in group "new leads" move sender to group "has replyed"
Rule 2. If sender not in group "new leads" or "has replyed" then move to group "new leads"

Then you periodically email everyone in "new leads" who was added earlier than a week ago, or whatver.

[Mardi_Gras]

Thanks for the response. We do route new enquiries to a special folder. The problem is that all new leads end up in the same folder. If a follow-up comes in, routing that to a separate folder is not a problem - we do already - but the original inquiry from that "live" lead will still be in the "New Inquiries" folder - along with others who have NOT followed up.

As far as I can tell, most mail rules only allow you to apply an action to a single e-mail. That is, I can't remove an e-mail from my new inquiries folder because a response comes in from someone who is already in that folder.

Or am I missing something?

[keyplyr]

Rather than auto-respond, I use contact forms built with PHP that returns an appropriate meassage after the user clicks send. Then, PHP code looks for the chosen subject (choices offered from a drop-down) and sends the request to one of several local inboxes.

PHP is perfect for stuff like this. I also have it write to a text file which resides on the server as a back-up precaution against email downtime.

[ytswy]

Mardi_Gras, what I was talking about is adding the sender of the email to a group, rather than putting the email into a folder.

I'm no expert in using mail client configuration :) but I'm pretty sure you can do that in most mail clients.

Rule 1. If sender in group "new leads" move sender to group "has replyed"
Rule 2. If sender not in group "new leads" or "has replyed" then move to group "new leads"

So what this is doing is first checking to see if any email you received is from someone who has already been responded to (or more accurately has emailed you before, I'm assuming the two are equivilent), and if so moving their contact details, not their message into the group used to store leads who have responded to the initial enquiry. The second rule is meant to move the contact details of new enquires into the relevant group - the one that the first rule checks.

I haven't ever implemented anything like this myself, so I may have overlooked something. But I think that should leave you with a group of email addresses called "new leads" who have emailed you only once - these I think are the ones are wanting to send an auto chase-up to.