Customer service emails play a vital role in how customers see and relate with your business. It is still an efficient way of reaching out to existing customers and making sure they stay customers.
And since in a lot of cases, communication is not face-to-face, you have very little control over how your client reacts. You have one chance to convince or inform them about new or existing products or services. In line with this, here are some tips for optimizing customer service emails for efficiency:
Create a personalized experience via segmentation
Customer service emails are an avenue to connect with your customers on a personal level, learn their pain points, and gain insights into consumer behavior. To achieve this, the lines of communication between both parties must be optimized for clarity, efficiency, and seamlessness.
Businesses that are not a niche usually have a diverse customer base, and the more these businesses grow, the more pronounced the diversity of their customer base becomes. Creating personalized emails for each customer will result in significant costs with respect to time and manpower, which is why some companies use templates for their email messages. But using templates may eliminate the personality factor from your service emails. And most customers still prefer the personal touch they get from talking to a real human.
Also, because of the difference in customer preferences, different types of messaging may be required to connect and interact with the different types of customers. Customer preferences differ based on personal, psychological, or environmental reasons, and while it may not be feasible to send personalized emails to each customer, you can still create a personalized experience for customers by segmenting your customers based on their preferences.
This is where you need to carry out consumer behavior analysis to find out and track these preferences and behaviors, and then group consumers that exhibit similar characteristics together. You can now craft specific emails, based on insights derived from your analysis, that appeal to different customers in different segments, thereby increasing personalized experience while mitigating the costs.
Send messages frequently and at the most optimal time
All businesses leveraging virtual call center technology have plenty to gain (or lose) based on how they handle customer service emails. The need for effective customer service emails is more pronounced for these businesses because it is easy to rate one mode of communication over another, especially in cases where customers use certain communication channels (like telephone calls) more often than others (like email).
Consumers’ email inboxes are usually bombarded with large amounts of emails from several businesses, all fighting for their limited attention. And because of the short attention span of consumers in this digital age, you have to remind them frequently about your products and offerings.
You also need to leverage analytics to find out the most frequent time your emails are being opened — chances are, that is your consumer’s free time — and concentrate your efforts on sending service messages at these times.
Focus on solving problems
A 2011 customer service report by American Express showed that customers are willing to pay more for better customer service, and solving customer problems is a significant part of that. It’s easy to point consumers to resources where they can get their problems solved themselves, but customers would rather you take the time out to solve it for them.
Focusing your email efforts on solving customer problems is a surefire way to increase open and click-through rates. Other things you can do in addition to these are to ensure your emails are optimized for mobile, include a call to action, and craft a catchy headline.
