5 tips to enhance your customer care with Email Marketing

Giving greater value to customer care while guaranteeing constant, empathic, and efficient assistance to our audience stands out among the 2020 teachings. Everyday, users are adapting to these times of rapid and constant change with new needs and higher expectations. Today’s user isn’t just looking for an answer to his or her problems. They want to feel recognized, understood, and, above all, considered. Here, companies must orient their customer care on two tracks that are difficult to reconcile, yet indispensable:

• satisfy the client’s need for empathy by providing personal and human assistance
• satisfy the need for an increasingly digital, constant, and immediate assistance experience. 

Above all, this second point calls for the need to integrate digital channels such as email into any customer care strategies. So let’s see how email marketing can enhance customer care.

Globally, about 90% of consumers believe that customer care is decisive in the purchase decision-making process, and this is true for every age group:

Providing a satisfactory and effective assistance is important under many perspectives, including the mere increase in profits or the higher purposes of brand reputation and public loyalty.

Just take a look at the statistics to realize how customer care is a real gold mine for any business:

• It brings 4 to 8% more profit for companies that prioritize its optimization.
• It favors the likelihood of a buyback by the customer. 89% of consumers are more likely to repeat a brand purchase after a positive customer care experience.
• It increases the so-called brand advocacy, which is the maximum degree of loyalty toward a brand: the likelihood of a customer recommending a brand to other consumers after receiving a satisfactory service goes up by 38%.
• It consolidate users’ trust and loyalty toward the brand. Almost 90% of consumers say they have more trust in a company whose support service is efficient and timely.

• Timeliness. Considered one of the most important features by 90% of customers, timeliness is the first sign of an effective and satisfactory assistance service. Receiving a quick response to a problem is obviously the first desire of every customer, but how do people establish this response speed? According to 60% of consumers, a response is considered “timely” when it’s within 10 minutes from the request for help.
• Immediacy. By immediacy, we mean the ability to solve a problem at the user’s first attempt in a “one-shot” assistance session. According to a survey by Microsoft, solving a problem upon the first request is key in a satisfying assistance.
• Competence. The above graph shows that the knowledgeability of those interacting with the customer is also key for good customer care. Users not only expect quick and easy answers to their problems but also to interact with a person capable to provide information that the user alone cannot find. This adds a concrete value.

In addition to these three key aspects, many other factors can contribute to a more satisfying service. Many of them have become even more decisive in the new post-pandemic normal:

• Empathic, personal, and human interaction
• Constant support independently from time and space limits
• Easy-to-find contact information

Finding digital tools to guarantee the same efficacy of physical assistance has never been as important as in the past year. In fact, 2020 brought the urgency of forms of virtual customer support to manage the numerous problems arising with the health emergency (canceled reservations, postponed events, suspended activities, shipping delays, and out-of-stock products) while preserving the empathy and humanity typical of in-person assistance.

In this scenario, users appreciated email as the most as a digital, quick, and immediate assistance tool. According to the 2021 consumer email tracker, users preferred the email channel (with 42% of votes) to ask for and get help. This even exceeded telephone contact and, given the circumstances, any in-person assistance.

Let’s see some tips to take advantage of this channel and direct your Email Marketing strategies toward the optimization of your customer care.

1. Anticipate any need for help

Provide your users with the ability to independently solve any problems, nipping any request for assistance in the bud. Create areas of your site to provide the customer with tutorials, guides, user manuals, and advice to receive basic training on your products and services. Also, always keep the FAQ section updated and easy to browse. This way, your customer will be able to find the information they’re looking for and will be much happier not having to waste time and energy to contact you. As a result, your support team will also be relieved dealing with less requests. 69% of consumers try to first solve their problems independently. Notwithstanding, less than a third of companies offer self-services to find answers.

Provide your onboarding emails for new customers with links to your support resources. As an alternative, illustrate how to use your product in an order confirmation or registration confirmation email after the customer has finalized the purchase:

2. Ask for feedback on your service

Asking for feedback on the support service can significantly increase the user’s customer satisfaction. Send a follow-up email with a survey and let your customer know that his or her opinion is fundamental to you. 

Although it’s a very simple and undemanding best practice, only 7% of companies ask for an opinion on the assistance provided. This can then be a plus to harness for overcoming competitors, as well as an essential strategy for understanding the aspects to improve.

3. Acknowledge receipt of a request to keep the customer updated

This is a very simple advice that shouldn’t be underestimated. Inform the user with an automatic email that his or her request has been received and that you’re working to resolve it. This will reassure your customer and won’t make him or her feel neglected.

4. Apologize and offer a benefit

In most cases, when a customer asks for help, it’s because of a problem due to a misstep on your part. This can result in a disservice, a defective product, a delay in shipping, a failure to send, and so on. After solving the issue, offering a benefit is very effective in making the customer forget the inconvenience and regaining his or her loyalty. This may be a discount code, a product gift, or an account upgrade. In fact, we’ve already seen that one of the best ways to apologize is to try to make the user feel special.

5. Use empathy and start a personal conversation with the user

Rather than a real strategy, this is a piece of advice on keeping a special tone of voice and style in your customer care messages.

Being empathic and human is key in providing a help service that truly satisfies the user. Nothing’s worse than establishing a cold and impersonal exchange with a client.

Accordingly, here are some elements not to be missed in your emails:

• The dynamic username field. Calling the customer by name while assisting him or her is the first commandment of optimal customer care.
• The signature and title of who, within your support team, is handling the request. In order to ensure a personal and intimate conversation, the client must know that a real person is working to offer support behind the message.
• A sender name already recognizable from the inbox. Customize the sender domain to avoid that the user doesn’t recognize you, thus not opening your communications and missing your reply. Also, create a specific subdomain to handle all support requests so your customers can easily recognize your support messages.

To keep existing customers loyal costs much less than acquiring new ones. However, the loyalty of a customer base goes far beyond a purely economic factor. Making sure your customers are always satisfied with your services is a matter of value and reputation.

Optimizing your customer care service is one of the main objectives for keeping the engagement of your audience high and facilitating sales. Email is an excellent channel to achieve this. These were some tips for integrating Email Marketing and customer care. Now it’s up to you to put them into practice!