Are You Wasting an Email Opportunity?

Taking orders and making reservations electronically is common business practice in many industries. So is sending an email to your customer confirming receipt of their order. If your business replies to customers’ emails to confirm orders or to acknowledge receipt of other electronic information, pause before you hit “send.” Take the time to read through your response—almost 100 percent of recipients open order confirmation emails. Personalized email responses are a business opportunity too good to pass up:  They help you boost your client base by building rapport with customers.  

Make email confirmation responses one of your biggest business assets. Leslie O’Flahavan, co-founder and partner in E-WRITE, an online writing training and consulting company, offers these four useful tips on improving your confirmation responses:

Establish a friendly tone. Ditch the drab, neutral tone and pump up your response with a warm voice. Now is not the time for drab business-speak—after all, you want to convey that doing business with you is a pleasant experience. “Setting a tone is like setting a thermostat,” O’Flahavan says. “I always set it 5 degrees warmer than it needs to be.” Avoid going overboard, though—you don’t want to come across as cheesy.

Personalize the text. Begin the response with the customer’s name, and state their reason for contacting you in the body of the email. Always close the email with your name, or another employee’s name, rather than just the name of your business.

Be informative. Provide complete contact information for your business. By arming customers with information, you can actually decrease the number of costly repeat contacts, O’Flahavan says. If you have specific content on your website that you think can help customers, provide a deep link to that particular web page rather than a general link to your home page.

Provide additional information. When confirming her customers’ participation in one of her writing courses, O’Flahavan takes the opportunity to inform them of other courses she offers, as long as they’re relevant. Even if you don’t have another product or service to promote, you can still connect with customers by featuring your web content or commenting on something relevant in your field, such as current events.

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