In this technological world, you would imagine that a huge proportion of sales enquiries come to companies by email. At Lionvest Trading (UK) Ltd probably around 50% of new business comes via email or through our website where the email address is widely published.
Yet having just been set the task to email an enquiry to 10 of the biggest plywood importers and groups in the country, and a nice sized enquiry at that, without one exception there were no email addresses for sales published on these companies’ websites! In fact, no email addresses at all! On calling, which is tiresome when it could just be published, some treated the request as if I was asking them to break the official secrets act rather than just tell me.
One or two websites have the enquiry form page, where you never quite trust it will actually reach the right person, and is tiresome filling in all the boxes when you could just send an email. I appreciate companies might get some junk mail if they simply list their email address, but certainly by the 10th company I was bored and fed-up with having to call and ask and, quite frankly, junk mail is easily dumped and deleted and blocked.
Please companies, rethink publishing your email address. You could be losing business by not doing so, and it’s certainly a great irritant when just trying to give you business.
Di Stevens
Marketing manager
Lionvest Trading (UK) Ltd
