Noreply Email Addresses: What Are They and Why Marketers Should Avoid Them
Have you ever attempted responding to a company to unsubscribe from their emails? And instead of a response, you got an automated message indicating your email couldn't be delivered?
Then, you've encountered the dreaded "noreply" email address.
What is a Noreply email address?
A noreply email address, commonly formatted as "noreply@domain.com," blocks any replies from reaching the sender.
Noreply emails are a relic of the old internet, historically adopted by giant companies to avoid an influx of responses to transactional communications like receipts, account activations, and shipping notifications.
In the early days of email, people needed to be trained on the concept that some emails are automatically generated (and are not sent by individual employees of a company). Fast forward a few decades, and everyone knows nobody will read your replies to an automated email. Yet the noreply email still persists.
Why email marketers should never send from a noreply email address
Unless you're a giant company with millions of people on your email list, it makes zero sense to ignore replies to your marketing emails. You'll leave tons of valuable customer feedback on the table as well as the opportunity to get better inbox placement.
It can hurt email deliverability
When a marketing email turns into a direct email thread with one of your customers, it tells inboxes you are important — and can often result in push notifications for that user on your future sends.
Emails from noreply addresses may be more likely to be filtered into spam or junk folders by Internet Service Providers (ISPs), email security settings, and spam filters. This can decrease open rates and overall deliverability, reducing the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns.
It's bad for user experience and feedback
The whole point of email marketing it to build a tighter long-term relationship with your customers. Preventing them from initiating a dialogue with you is antithetical to this goal.
Email is often the place where customers will hear from you most, providing them an extremely low-friction method for feedback. Unless you're running a monopoly tech giant, listening to customer feedback regarding your business is highly recommended!
It's a risk factor for GDPR & regulatory compliance
Under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the ability for subscribers to easily contact a sender is more critical than ever. Relying solely on an 'noreply' autoresponder for such communications and ignoring any replies from customers requesting you to stop contacting them presents a potential regulatory risk related to GDPR compliance.
It can prevent your inclusion to address books
Many ISPs and email inbox providers don't allow users to add noreply emails to their address book. This means you're closing off a potential route to improving your email deliverability and staying out of the spam folder.
You won't see certain soft bounces & changed email notifications
While most email platforms (including Audienceful) remove invalid email addresses, some niche inbox providers don't provide the proper feedback mechanism for us to do this automatically. Some providers actually send an email response to indicate the inbox is no longer valid. You have to manually remove these people from your list.
How to recieve replies to your marketing emails
If the email address you're sending from has a valid inbox set up at its address, that's all you need to do to recieve replies!
If you need help, we've written a separate guide on receiving replies to marketing emails.