People seeking information from SA's top listed companies via e-mail should count themselves lucky if they get a reply. Companies evaluated in the FM's Best Corporate Websites Award were as bad in 2006 at responding to e-mails from various stakeholders as they were in previous years.
The e-mail responsiveness assessment measured the timeliness and quality of the replies companies sent to e-mailed queries from researchers posing as investors, jobseekers and prospective customers or business partners.
Two inquiries were sent for each user scenario.
The e-mail addresses used for the research were culled from company websites, with researchers trying to use appropriate contacts for investor relations, human resources and commerce (sales).
If no specific contacts for these areas were available, generic contacts and webforms were used, or as a last resort, e-mail addresses from third party resources, such as McGregor's.
Replies that did not arrive within a week of the original query were disregarded, based on past experience that the vast majority of companies reply to e-mails within three days or not at all.
The quality measure included 25 metrics encompassing areas such as the tone, content and format of the reply e-mail.
As in previous years, most companies that responded did so within one day. More than a third of companies failed to respond to either of the investor relations e-mails.
About two thirds of companies didn't reply to either of the candidate e-mails while close on a half didn't answer either of the commerce e-mails.
Close on a fifth did not answer any of the e-mails that were sent to them as part of the research.
Last year, one e-mail was sent to the investor relations contact and another to a public relations contact.
Only 58% of companies replied to the investor-related inquiry and 53% responded to the public relations inquiry.
A third of companies responded to both and 21% responded to neither.
