Great Email Customer Service Begins With a Realization: There's a Human Being Behind Every Address
By Sarah Eaton
Recently, one of my colleagues commended a client on a well-conceived list of customers and prospects. Our client paused, then said, "You know to me, it's not a list — it's people."
When my colleague relayed that conversation to me, I wanted to pump my fist in the air with joy. What a succinct way to put something that many email marketers miss!
Behind every email address is a human being — a person who should be treated with the same respect and courtesy he would be if he'd walked into your office.
This fundamental understanding is the beginning of excellent email customer service. That respect begins with the way you handle customers' names in your list and continues every time you touch that email address or the subscriber touches you.
There are a number of different ways (the negative, the neutral and the positive) in which people can respond to your email beyond the traditional click-throughs that are generally measured to establish effectiveness.
Just as you would carefully consider customer service in the real world, consider your approach in the world of email. Here's some help:
The Negative, or as I like to call it, The Chance to Provide Excellent Customer Service
You send out a highly relevant, informative, useful newsletter and get this in return: "Unsubscribe me," or, in some cases, "UNSUBSCRIBE ME!" Although you have a link in your newsletter where people can remove themselves from your lists, many people choose to bypass that method and go directly to the source.
This is a chance for you to provide excellent customer service. Maybe they signed up for your newsletter and forgot they did; maybe they're just having a bad day. When you receive a message like this, you can assume that the person on the other end of the communication might be a little bit irritated with you.
Now, nobody wants to be in that position, and a great way to turn it around is to reply to these messages as speedily, accurately and kindly as possible. Here's what you do:
- Be prepared: When you send a communication out to your list, have a real, live employee sitting on the return email box, waiting for replies.
- If someone asks to be unsubscribed, do so immediately. Don't let the unsubscribes pile up for you to do at some unspecified later date. All kinds of mishaps can occur in the interim that result in you breaking the rules of CAN-SPAM and further irritating your former subscriber.
- Let your former subscriber know you've unsubscribed them from the list, which means that they will not receive any email correspondence from you again. Be polite about it; be sincere.
Odds are that the person will appreciate it; maybe they won't ask to be returned to the list, but their most recent interaction with your company will have been a positive one.
The Neutral, or as I like to call it, List
Hygiene Opportunity
The bummer for that employee sitting on your return email box after you send out a newsletter or an alert is that they will get (in addition to the unsubscribes) a slew (yes, a slew) of out-of-office auto-replies.
Well, that's not really a response, you might be saying; what does an auto-reply tell me? It gives you important information about the people on your list.
Sure, some people may simply be out for the day, but many people use this feature to let others know they have retired or moved on to a different position.
Remove these people from your list for better list hygiene and deliverability.
The Positive, or as I like to call it, The Positive
Someone hits reply and sends you back a message regarding something in your newsletter, or something he's been meaning to talk about with the person who appears as the sender of your message.
This occurrence demonstrates the effectiveness of your newsletter. You've taken the chance to communicate with a large number of people in a way that can feel very personal to the recipients (particularly if the list has been segmented, so each person is receiving content that is relevant to her.) The people on your list appreciate this and respond to the message. That's great.
But only if you respond to those messages in kind. You have your employee (or, you know, an employee from your favorite newsletter outsource solution company, BeTuitive Marketing) sitting on that return email box. Have that person forward the personal replies pronto, so you can take action.
Any time anyone thrusts a clipboard at me and asks for my email address, I put down my real and true, actual address (well, my secondary one). I think of it as research.
But, most other people only sign up for things that they really want to receive. That's the basis of permission marketing: You're not interfering with someone's daily life; you're assisting him in it.
Many marketers remember that while they're creating content, but when it comes to email customer service, there's considerably less enthusiasm. But, that doesn't mean it isn't extremely important.
Start with the person behind the email address in mind and email marketing success will follow.
Sarah Eaton is the Managing Editor for BeTuitive Publishing. Sarah brings her strong gut sense for business, an interest in marketing analytics and a respect for the power of the written word to BeTuitive. Check out her blog: BeTuitive: Actionable Results for the latest e-marketing strategies.
Copyright © 2007 BeTuitive Marketing
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