Regardless of industry, customer service is always one of the most important aspects of running a successful business.

Not only does excellent customer service set you apart from your competition, but it also helps you to improve customer retention rates while extracting the maximum value from each of your engagements. On top of this, it’s estimated to take 12 positive customer experiences to make up for one negative experience, so it’s definitely worth your while reinforcing competent customer service right across your organization.

The importance of email in customer service

Despite the rise of social media, email remains the most popular method of communication between businesses and consumers. Moreover, email is typically the go-to touchpoint for customer service interactions, whether for complaints, inquiries, or discussing issues that require immediate attention. So, why is email preferred over other forms of communication, such as social media?

• Email provides a direct line of communication between the company and the customer, offering a structured format where both parties can easily access historical communication.

• Customers feel safe expressing their opinions and potentially feel more valued in a formal, private one-to-one interaction.

• Not everybody has a social media account, and it is hard to come by somebody who doesn’t use email.

• Email gives both parties adequate “breathing space” to resolve issues, rather than the instant messaging feature provided by social media.

However, writing customer service emails is not as straightforward as it appears. If you have a disgruntled customer or are unfamiliar with best practices, you could easily make a bad situation worse. In addition, a lack of experience with drafting customer service emails can also result in a loss of revenue-generating opportunities, which can affect your bottom line and cause you to fall behind your competition. With this in mind, we’ve compiled a list of five short tips to help you create more effective customer service emails so you can feel completely confident when interacting with people via this medium.

Show that you’re a human

First things first, you need to let the customer know that you are, in fact, a human being and not an automated bot. Most of us can attest to the frustration that canned replies and computer-generated responses bring, especially if you need an issue resolved promptly. Therefore, try to show a human side when generating your email response. This could be as simple as using their first name or directly referencing some of the issues they brought up in their initial email contact.

Show empathy

Empathy is the act of recognizing, feeling, understanding, and vicariously experiencing another person’s emotions, thoughts, and experiences. It goes without saying, then, that empathy is a very useful trait to have while interacting with customers. For example, when addressing a customer’s problem, try to understand how they are feeling. Put yourself in their shoes before telling them you understand their concerns. Even if you disagree with what the customer is saying, a simple “I understand” can defuse and de-escalate a situation which can help you find more effective solutions.

Keep it professional

Maintaining professionalism is fundamental in customer service interactions. A polite demeanor, sound judgment, and maintaining one’s integrity go a long way toward improving customer satisfaction and retention and will undoubtedly assist you in reaching mutually beneficial solutions faster. However, appearing professional via email entails more than simply the words you use; it also includes how you portray yourself visually.

For starters, it’s important that you always use a business email (not a Gmail domain, for example); otherwise, customers may not feel as though your company is legitimate. If you have a team of employees, you must also ensure that they all use a uniform email signature that includes important company information, such as links to home pages, social trust badges, certifications, and company/employee contact details. The good news is that you don’t have to do all of this manually since tools such as WiseStamp can help you generate and manage company-wide unified email signatures in minutes. Simply follow WiseStamp’s Outlook signature guide in order to directly integrate the solution into your email service provider, and your entire customer-facing team will look more professional in no time.

Keep things simple and clear

In most cases, simplicity is the best course of action. Rather than getting bogged down in the specifics or arguing over semantics, you should strive to resolve the problem in a straightforward manner. This means using simple language and never making assumptions about a customer’s understanding of technical issues or industry jargon. Furthermore, over-familiarity can also make things complicated. Thus, keep your tone friendly yet informative, and concentrate on the resolution above all else.

Be realistic with the resolution

Finally, you must be realistic regarding your solution to the customer’s problem. Start by clearly defining the issue, and then, once you’ve identified a mutually beneficial solution, deliver it as is, with no extra bells and whistles. It’s easy to fall into the trap of overpromising a customer as a “quick fix,” especially if they’re irritated. However, you will end up causing additional problems for both you and the customer in the long run.

When you make a mistake, own up to it and apologize to the customer. If the product fails, acknowledge it and offer your apologies once again. After all, if there is one trait that people value, it is honesty. Keep this in mind across all of your email interactions with customers.

About the Author

Philip Piletic – My primary focus is a fusion of technology, small business, and marketing. I’m a writer, marketing consultant and guest author at several authority websites. In love with startups, the latest tech trends and helping others get their ideas off the ground. You can find me on LinkedIn.

It’s easy to think that your customer service emails are already the best that they can be. However, it’s an almost sure bet that your organization is making some common mistakes that could potentially confound your clients. The good news is that it’s almost equally a good bet that a few simple changes are all you need to make amends.

Perhaps the first thing to do is read back a few messages to yourself. While it can be difficult to find time during the business day to respond to every single message personally, you should set some time aside to refine your craft. Read over your emails and see if you would want to respond back to them. If not, then take out anything that might be troublesome.

Those who are pressed for time might want to rely on a special template in the future so that they don’t run into this kind of difficulty. An important metric to consider is the average amount of time that your clients spend reading your messages.

Tailoring Messages to Avoid Wasting Time

Most people spend less than 20 seconds reading an email regardless of how long it might be. Over half of people may not even open their inboxes at all. If the most important pieces of information that you want to communicate to your clients aren’t included in the first part of each email that you send, then there’s a good chance that they’re never going to see them. Make sure that everything that your clients need to know gets communicated right away.

Don’t waste their time with unnecessary headers, marketing promotions or even introductions. While you do want to use a client’s real name to start the message off, you shouldn’t feel like you need to add more material than is absolutely necessary to get the ball rolling. This is especially important when you’re sending out cart abandonment messages or anything else related to the field of eCommerce. It’s easy to get carried away, but you don’t want to obscure the actual meat of your message by burying it under anything else.

Regardless of what you put at the top of your message, make sure that it’s warm enough to sound personable in order to encourage potential consumers to continue to read what you’ve written to them. Something like good morning or evening is more polite than simply hello, and it’s relatively easy to configure a mail merge system to adjust this line based on the time of day. In fact, you might want to start picking out templates based around the idea that you shouldn’t be giving your clients anything that they don’t want.

Selecting Email Templates That Don’t Offend

Though there’s plenty about email templates online already, few individuals want to admit that a majority of templates are quite bland and could easily be ignored by those that they’re intended for. On the other hand, it’s very easy to get carried away and add so much content to your templates that people start to suffer from information overload when they read your messages.

Look over the basic templates that came with the customer relationship management application you’re currently using. There’s a high probability that some of the basic ones would be perfect for your needs after just a modicum of editing. You might also find that some of the bundled features of whatever software you’re using tackle most of the job for you, leaving you free to add in extra touches to avoid offending the sensibilities of your most discerning customers.

While automatic personalized marketing certainly has a place, you won’t want to leave everything to a cold algorithm. Take at least some time to personalize messages for people who have reached out to you in order to ask for a little additional help. Though it might take a little resorting to your schedule to do so, it could be quite worth it in the long run.

You may not even have to dedicate that much time to the process since brevity does count.

Keeping Your Messages Short

Remember that many consumers can’t sit there for even half a minute to read an email. It’s pointless to fill your messages with more content than they could ever consume in that time. Have your customers’ history on hand when writing a message so you can be sure that you’re hitting all the right points. If you make sure to get everything together from the get-go, then you can save time and dramatically improve the kind of customer service messages that your organization is sending out.

About the Author

Philip Piletic – My primary focus is a fusion of technology, small business, and marketing. I’m a writer, marketing consultant and guest author at several authority websites. In love with startups, the latest tech trends and helping others get their ideas off the ground. You can find me on LinkedIn.

Customers always come first – and they’re always right. It doesn’t matter which of the two you believe because they are the standards when it comes to business ethics.

In email marketing, following these standards doesn’t only mean being honest with your customers. Using tools to tend to their concerns or deliver relevant content are also part of your responsibility.

By using the right email marketing tools for good customer management, you’re able to promote customer loyalty, invite more prospects, and grow your business. All of these create success as an email marketer. Keep on reading to find out how the best marketing tool meets your needs.

1. The ability to manage your email campaigns in one interface

Throughout your journey as an email marketer, you will send a lot of campaigns to your customers. It’s easy to be confused while monitoring all of the individual engagements your campaigns receive. This is because some marketing tools require you to open various tabs for campaign management.

The right marketing tool should have a simple user interface where switching from one campaign manager to another is easy. That way, you’re able to address all of your customers’ concerns without taking too much time.

2. Segment your list for more relevant customer emails

Customers, although individually unique, can be categorized based on their demographics, location, and interests. To keep your customers happy and interested, you need to choose a marketing tool with a list segmentation function so that you can categorize users and send them highly personalized campaigns that best match the different segments they belong to.

3. Ensure deliverability

Once users take an interest in your services and subscribe to your mailing list, they’re going to come back for more. It becomes your responsibility to make all of your campaigns land in their inboxes so that they stay updated on what’s new. The function that an email marketing tool needs for this is the spam-checker.

This is a function that analyzes the content of your campaigns and would notify you that your created campaign has a high chance of getting rejected, bounced, ignored, blocked, or sent to the spam box. It’s also important that you should build a sender’s reputation through IP warming first. The higher your reputation is, the better your deliverability rates will be.

4. Customer relationship management (CRM) email integration

Keeping a record of your customers and their data through a CRM is essential in email marketing. This is one factor that increases the accuracy and relevance of the campaigns you compose. The problem is, you also need an email client to send relevant campaigns.

The data that is stored in the CRM is needed by the email client so that it will know which campaigns are to be sent and the users to which the campaigns are sent. Without CRM email integration, you’ll have to do the sending manually which would result in a lot of your customers receiving your campaigns late.

The CRM that has an integration function will automatically be read by your chosen email client and the client will automatically send your campaigns to your target recipients.

5. Send interactive email content to your customers

Email marketing has significantly evolved throughout the years. Before, campaigns were just formal letters in digital form. Now, email contents are more creative with photos, videos, and even links to social media accounts or a business domain.

But crafting such a campaign is hard to do, especially if a marketing tool doesn’t have a template creator or editor. The marketing tool of your choice should allow you to create campaigns based on your design – particularly an interactive one.

To check this, ask the representative or customer support of your marketing tool if there is a function that allows campaign template creation. Better yet, ask if there are premade interactive templates available.

6. Automate the personalization of campaign content

Plenty of customers prefer to be addressed personally in the greetings of your campaigns. This is because they feel more like a business partner rather than a cash cow. However, writing all of your customers’ names in all of your campaigns will take forever to be done.

Your email marketing tool for campaign composition should be able to read the customer names in your CRM. Then, it should automatically input the names in the greetings before sending the campaigns are sent by the email client.

7. A 24/7 tech support to assist you

There are times when you’ll encounter difficulties when using your email marketing tools. They may be because of errors, regular patches, or features that you aren’t familiar with. That’s why you should choose a tool that has 24/7 tech support.

The tech support will guide you on how to operate your tool properly so that you can keep on making your customers happy by serving them well.

Final Words

Most email marketing tools nowadays already have the features that can help you deliver excellent customer service for business growth. But there are also a lot of tools that lack an integration feature.

Out of all the things you should look for when choosing your marketing tools, integration should always be at the top of your checklist. This is because integration eliminates the need for email marketers like you to do a lot of manual processes.

About the Author

Efrat Vulfsons is the Co-Founder of PR Soprano and a data-driven marketing enthusiast, parallel to her soprano opera singing career. Efrat holds a B.F.A from the Jerusalem Music Academy in Opera Performance.

Keeping a customer is cheaper than acquiring a new one. So how do you use email marketing to drive more customer loyalty? Here are some actionable tips to improve your strategy fast.

For every organization, building customer loyalty is a constant goal. It makes sense when you think about the fact that it costs five times as much to attract a new customer than to keep an existing one.

So, you want to make sure you’re using all the tools at your disposal to nurture your current customers. For instance, email is a tremendous channel to foster long-term relationships with your clients. Here is how to make the most of email marketing while not adding too much to your workload.

Start with a neat email list: use an email checker

You’re spending time and money to send email campaigns. Unless you have an excess of these two resources, you’re expecting some results in return. But, no matter how much you work on creating your email marketing campaigns, they’ll fall flat if you’re list is not up-to-date.

Making the effort to clean your list pays off. How do you do that? By using an email checker and letting it weed out the bad data you’ve acquired. Bad data includes:

• invalid email addresses: for instance, whenever someone makes a typo while trying to subscribe to your emails, you lose a lead. Moreover, that email will bounce, affecting your sender score and deliverability.
• abuse emails: some people will label your emails as Spam, and an email checker like ZeroBounce will know who those people are ahead of time. The system detects these accounts and isolates them from your list to prevent Spam complaints.
• spam traps: these types of email addresses are a genuine risk to your email marketing. As they don’t even belong to real human beings, they won’t help you drive any customer loyalty. Furthermore, their purpose is to lure in spammers and block future messages from them.
• temporary emails: have you ever created one because you didn’t want to share your email address? Other people do that, too. As a result, you end up with a disposable email in your list that’s surely going to bounce at some point.

These are just a few examples of email addresses that don’t add any value to your email marketing. Get an email checker to remove them from your list, so you can email more confidently.

Make your content a feast: customize and invest in good writing

Don’t you love it when you get an email that has just the content you were looking for? Or, even better, it educates you about an important topic you weren’t even aware of?

Your subscribers feel the same. They love it when they get a great email from you, so do your best to meet – and exceed – their expectations. It’s the best way to use email marketing to drive customer loyalty.

But how do you create the type of content your audience needs and wants? Here are some tips to get you started:

• learn as much as you can about your subscribers. Whether you deploy surveys or invite them to share their pain points with you on social media, discover what they want. So you can give them just that.
• then, customize your content and make it as specific as possible. Once you gather more data about your audience, split your email list so you can send personalized emails to each group.
• run occasional promo campaigns. Everybody loves a good deal, and your customers make no exception. A discount code, free shipping or a special birthday gift will make their day – and support customer loyalty.
• pay attention to your email marketing reports. Knowing what works and what doesn’t will help you fine-tune your emails and foster more customer loyalty in the long run.

If writing is not your forte, consider hiring a professional. Maybe a copywriter won’t have to write all of your emails, but offer you valuable advice. Also, get your hands on every copywriting freebie you can find. E-books, webinars, infographics, courses – they will all teach you how to write better.