Communicating With Your Customers: A Guide To Company Emails

Less is more when it comes to contacting your customers; you don’t want them clicking the dreaded ‘unsubscribe’ button…

Building a relationship with your customers is a great way to encourage them to stay on board; a consumer who is considered a ‘friend’ of your brand is more likely to return as a paying customer. This relationship can however be hard to manage: when does amicable communication become too much?

Email is a great way of communicating with your customer base. Unlike social media, existing customers don’t have to click that all important ‘like’ or ‘follow’ button, as their email address is typically collected during a transaction. Emails are sent out to confirm payment and provide an online receipt, but that’s not all they’re good for…

You should be taking full advantage of your email bank. From news updates to promotional sales, touching base with your consumers is invaluable and can encourage them to part with more of their cash for your product. Unfortunately, human nature also means that there’s an invisible line that you can’t cross with email, and many of today’s brands get it terribly wrong.

So what’s good email etiquette?

Don’t bombard.

Less is more: updating your customer base sporadically is enough to remind them that you exist without shoving it in their faces. As a rule, we suggest sending one weekly email at most to avoid a high unsubscription rate.

Simplify.

While we all appreciate good grammar – every correspondence with your clientele should be professional and well-crafted – you should keep textual content to a minimum. Don’t forget, you’re intruding on your customers’ personal time by contacting them when they’re not shopping with you. Don’t make the experience more challenging than it should be: keep text to a minimum and invest in eye-catching visuals to avoid coming across as  too business-like.

Have a message.

Don’t contact your customers if you don’t have something valuable to say: contact for the sake of contact is obsolete. The best time to email your customer base is to announce a new promotion or a newsworthy development which will benefit your clientele, so try to keep irrelevant news out of customer inboxes.

Include a call to action.

Make sure your email has a purpose: include a strong call to action (CTA) so your email contacts know exactly what it is you want them to gain by contacting them. If you’re promoting a sale, provide a clear link to more information on your website and a way that makes the shopping experience as simple as possible. The less effort the recipient has to make, the more successful your email campaign will be. Simply providing a news update? Your CTA could be a feedback box or a link to more related information elsewhere.

Make it social!

Include links to your social media channels in all correspondence, and encourage your email base to go the extra mile and connect with you on each channel. Your social media presence is an integral marketing tool, and encouraging your customers to subscribe to more regular updates from your brand may yield more sales.

Create a routine.

A great way to send a regular stream of emails is to compile a monthly newsletter to send out to all your contacts, informing them of all the exciting news about your business! This is a great way to create rapport with your client base as you can include personal news from within the company and generate an air of exclusivity around the insight into your brand that your customers are receiving.

Every web hosting account from UK2 comes with a free email account which you can use to contact your customers as your online presence grows. Get started today over on our website!