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.
