Email Objective, Improve Customer Satisfaction and Branding
Originally email marketing was used as an inexpensive sales tool businesses used to broadcast a sale or event. Today, email is still used as a tactic to broadcast products and sales to customers, but the smartest businesses have learned to leverage the benefits of email to improve customer satisfaction. As a result, these business are building and sustaining customers by increasing customer loyalty through brand awareness that is built on customer relationships based on satisfaction.
The new cornerstone of email is about communicating with the customer to improve customer satisfaction.
As email becomes more sophisticated, many businesses are taking advantage of the low cost associated with staying connected to the customer. This form of customer satisfaction is beyond asking the customer to take a survey. It is not about saving the customer money or product marketing. Using email to improve customer satisfaction can take on a number of forms. For example, a business can use email to effectively communicate the status of an existing order. It is about providing tracking numbers on shipments. Customer satisfaction is about sending a confirmation that a form submission was received and will be handled quickly. Customer loyalty is about providing contact information in case there are questions. Customer satisfaction is about targeting customer interest so the customer only receives information they requested. It is about providing one click, easy opt-out links in footers in emails.
This strategy means allocating resources toward communication. It does not include sending information about sales, or analyzing customer behavior. In this regard, customer satisfaction requires more than buying CRM software that analyzes the customer’s behavior; as described in an article posted by Erik Johnels, CRM Software is a Waste of Money. In his article Erik says,
Even though we know that the customer relationship is important to success; CRM software is sold and bought without this being much of an actually concern. This is why so many companies get the wrong results. They are looking for the quick measurable metric. Somewhere in that thinking, we forget that the customer was supposed to come first. Those who sell CRM software knows that the company is more interested in being able to measure success than in actually achieving it, you can see that in their sales pitches.
Communicating with the customer via email is an effective strategy to improving customer loyalty through satisfaction. The strategy does not focus on sales, but communication and relationships that will increase brand awareness that over time will increase sales.
Right on, I’v worked with a company few years ago that basically relied 99% of the time on automated/generated emails sent to our clients every month and after each project. The result was losing the “human face” of the company and not to mention clients’ loyalty.
When we started out company, we paid extra attention to this part, we can humbly say we have over 80% of clients always coming back.
I think what you are saying here is a KEY feature in marketing and customer service. The more you connect with a client and various levels using diverse approaches, the more they are assured that they are not just a contact on an emailing list, or a survey target.
Great job highlighting this point mate, I already pointing people to your blog. Keep it up.
Gary, I’m glad you are mentioning loyalty. You raise a valid point about using emails to leverage loyalty. Fred Reichheld and his book “The Loyalty Effect” is a great read.
I found an excerpt from Fred’s Book, “The Loyalty Effect”, it is something we all know …but occasionally it is good re-learn. Fred said,
Forget Profits, Focus on Value…
“The true mission of a business is to create value. Any business muddled enough to believe that its real purpose is producing profit is probably not long for this world. Profit is absolutely essential, to be sure, but it is a downstream outcome of creating value, and so it functions very poorly as an objective in itself. One of the reasons so many businesses fail is that all their analysis and learning revolves around profit, so they become aware of problems only when their profits begin to decline. In struggling to fix their profits, they concentrate on a symptom and miss the underlying breakdown in their value-creation system.”