Do not ignore email marketing because it is not a state-of-the-art marketing and customer support strategy. It is still one of the most powerful lead nurturing and customer engagement channels with the highest ROI. As such, it is an inevitable ingredient of your omnichannel support strategy.
Here is how to combine email with your omnichannel support tactics.
Email as a Core Customer Support Channel
Research studies found that email is still the most commonly used digital customer service channel. Namely, 54% of customers use it to seek help. Moreover, companies that respond promptly and accurately to their users’ emails will boost their trust in their brand and increase sales, both online and offline. Precisely because of that, email service is an inevitable part of your omnichannel support strategy.
However, when building your email customer support strategy, remember that customers’ expectations have changed. They now expect companies to respond to their emails within an hour. Use your website to inform users about your common response times. Let them know when they can expect your feedback. Above all, level up your email support strategy by investing in the right tools.
For starters, invest in an email ticketing tool that manages your customer service inquiries. Those software pieces distribute customer tickets and organize email queues, making sure that every customer email is addressed appropriately. For example, with HubSpot’s all-in-one email ticketing system, you can log all customer conversations into a single location. That way, your agents will be able to track the status of email tickets and respond to them faster. The tool also notifies your email service reps about any changes to your email tickets.
You can also take advantage of artificial intelligence and sentiment analysis to analyze customers’ emails. For example, you can use an AI-driven sentiment analysis tool to read customer emails and tag them based on the type of a customer’s problem, their emotions, previous purchases, etc. That way, the tickets will be pointed to the agents that are best-suited to resolve them.
Using Email Marketing to Promote Customer Service
Companies often treat marketing and customer support as separate business units. Let’s take a look at the traditional model of a sales funnel. It consists of several stages a customer needs to go through, including awareness, interest, desire, and purchase. However, such a siloed approach to a sales funnel is quite outdated and has many disadvantages.
For starters, this model indicates that lead generation and sales are the responsibility of marketing and sales teams only. It neglects the impact of customer service on conversions and customer retention. Above all, it does not care about the customers once they complete the purchase. And, stats teach us that repeat customers are far more profitable than new ones.
Marketing and customer support should not exist in a vacuum. On the contrary, they should intertwine to provide consistent and trustworthy customer experiences. You can cross-promote your customer support channels in multiple ways. For example, you could create email boxes on your website so your customers can easily sign up for your email newsletter. Always include your email address on other digital channels you use, such as social media pages or your website. If a customer uses your knowledge base and they cannot find the answer to their question, point them to your email support agents to solve their problem.
On the other hand, you could use email marketing to promote other customer support channels. There are different types of email marketing campaigns, such as welcome email series, standard promotion email series, seasonal campaigns, post-purchase drip campaigns, newsletter campaigns, abandoned cart campaigns, re-engagement campaigns, etc. The goal of these campaigns is to build and nurture stronger relationships with customers. As such, they are perfect for promoting your customer support channels.
For example, when sending an abandoned cart email or a re-engagement email, you could motivate your leads to contact you for more information. Provide them with clickable links to your customer support channels, such as your social media channels, live chat, or email support. Based on customers’ browsing history, previous purchases, or service inquiries, you could also send them links to knowledge base articles to help them find answers to their questions faster.
Or, you could also conduct customer satisfaction surveys, create polls, or ask for reviews to learn what they feel about your customer support channels. Transform customer feedback into relevant statistics and testimonials and use them in your promotional emails as social proof. Knowing that customers are satisfied with your customer services, your prospects will make a purchasing decision faster.
Choose a CRM System that Unifies your Marketing and Customer Service Channels
When a customer has questions about your email marketing campaign, who are they going to contact? Your customer service team. For example, say a customer ditched a shopping cart and received the abandoned cart email from your marketing team, offering a 10% discount if they complete the purchase. To learn more about the discount, a customer calls your support center, but they do not know anything about the offer. That would harm the customer’s experience with your brand and probably discourage them from completing the purchase.
To prevent that, you should ensure both your customer support teams are in the know about the latest campaigns your email marketing team is rolling out. That is where you need to invest in a solid CRM system that integrates your marketing and customer support data. It allows both teams to make notes and upload files directly in the system and make them visible to everyone.
CRM software can benefit both teams.
For your customer support teams, it means they will provide customers with more relevant and actionable feedback. First, CRM lets them manage multi-channel customer service channels (email, live chat, chatbots, social networks, phone systems) via a single dashboard. Most importantly, when a customer calls to ask about a marketing campaign, they will not need to wait for a customer service agent to contact the marketing team and ask for information. By integrating a small business VoIP solution with your CRM, call center agents can easily search the database to learn about your latest marketing campaigns and provide customers with actionable feedback.
Your email marketing team, on the other hand, can use a CRM system as a treasure trove of customer information. By analyzing customer tickets, a marketing team can understand what problems customers commonly face and what their sources of frustration, nostalgia, and happiness are. That way, they will be able to create detailed buyer personas and segment newsletter lists better based on customers’ demographic, psychographic, and behavioral data. That way, they will be able to create highly personalized email marketing campaigns and drive more sales in the future.
Email is the Nerve Center of Omnichannel Support
Whether it is observed as a customer support channel or a marketing channel, email remains the foundation of your CX strategy. It gives you the opportunity to build stronger relationships with customers and gain their trust. As a customer service channel, its major benefit lies in the fact that it is easily integrated with other customer support tools.
Using helpdesk and CRM tools, you will be able to merge email ticketing with other customer service channels and manage interactions from a single dashboard. Customer service data can also help your email marketing team understand its target audience and create personalized campaigns and offers in the future.
As a marketing tool, email engages customers through interactive content and personalized offers. It may be a powerful tool for promoting customer support that would, ultimately, lead to greater conversions.