Email has become a powerful communication tool for businesses to promote their products or services, share newsletters, schedule meetings, dispatch automated notifications, and improve customer experience. One significant advantage of using emails in business communication is that they’re so commonplace that we can safely assume that almost everyone with the internet has an email. For this reason, marketers tend to focus more on using email as one of their most important sales channels.
However, the role of email in business marketing has grown well beyond its use as just another sales channel. Do you know that your business email can equally be used to offer discounts to your customers and build brand loyalty?
Here’s a deep dive into how to use email in business, besides its use as a sales funnel.
Use Email to Provide Excellent Customer Support
The emergence of email is a major boom to enterprises, it’s made it easier to keep in contact with clients and customers regularly, and in a more personal way. According to a study published by Jupiter Research, email was considered to be the fastest-growing customer support channel. Rightly so, as far back 2005, the number of existing email accounts was projected to jump from 2.9 billion to about 7.2 billion emails worldwide in 2010.
Among other things, your business email could be used by your customers to report any problem they have with your products. Whether you realize it or not, your email is a valuable tool for providing customer support service.
However, providing a good email customer service is more than good grammar content and technology; these don’t guarantee a satisfied customer. Standard steps to follow in using email as part of your customer service strategy include:
#1. Prompt response to inquiries
Nothing more infuriates a customer with a defective product, questions, or enquiries than sending an email and waiting to no end for a response from a business. Whether it’s an automated or human response, you need to respond promptly to each customer’s message.
#2. Resolve your customer’s complaint
Don’t just send an email acknowledging that you received the customer’s complaint. NO
Make sure you to find a solution to the problem and inform the customer ASAP.
#3. Send a follow-up email
After you must have provided useful information to the customer regarding his/her complaint, endeavor to follow-up with another message in a few days to check whether or not the customer was satisfied with the help.
#4. Prompt your customer to fill out a survey
If you want quality feedback about your customer’s experience with your product, or service, or business in general, ask him/her to fill out a survey (or a questionnaire).
#5. Use the customer’s correspondence as an opportunity
Now that you’ve established a correspondence with the customer ask for permission to send him/her coupons promos, or your newsletters.
Use Email to Make New Product Announcements and Share Press Releases
Got a product upgrade? A new service? Moving to another location or just opened a new branch office?
A curated mailing list is the most appropriate means of sharing these essential pieces of information with your esteemed customers and prospects. If done the right way, it will help you launch your new product, for instance, to the people who are ready to purchase it. This is because they had already shown interest by signing up to your mailing list in the first instance.
Therefore, it makes a lot of sense when you use email to give your customers, as well as the trade press, prior notice of planned events.
Use Email to Offer Discounts and Publicize Special Promotions
Everybody wants a bargain offer. So, your mailing list could be used to alert customers of your latest promo deals. When you offer the discounts exclusively to those in the mailing list, you’re communicating the feeling that you value their loyalty to your brand.
Further, if you want to promote a new product, participate in a co-branded campaign, trade show, or an open house, your mailing list could be used to inform people.
Use Email to Drive Traffic to Your Website
Email newsletters and updates are a quick way to get information across to your subscribers while motivating them to take action promptly. To draw home the importance of email to a marketing operation, 20% of marketers, who participated in a research conducted by Salesforce, said that their business’ primary revenue source was from email operations. Bearing this in mind, no effort should be spared in ensuring that your email becomes your major source of revenue.
Common hacks to employ in this regard include: increasing your subscriber list, using catchy subject lines in your newsletters, personalizing the emails, optimizing the emails for viewing mediums and targets, including relevant links to valuable sources of information, and inserting call-to-action for best results.
Use Email to Sponsor a Contest or Promote a Social Cause
As a business owner, you could sponsor contests and offer prizes to attract prospective customers to your brand. The gifts may not be too expensive or large, but these gestures will undoubtedly help draw more attention to your business.
Finally, use your email to promote community projects, encourage participation in government, solicit public support for charity, and publicize issues of public concern.