Proving a great customer experience (CX) is a bit like being the cook on Thanksgiving dinner.
You want to give your best dinner ever, but it’s going to be a whole lot of time and energy to get there.
All turkey stuffing and unbuttoned pants joke aside, brands that provide consumers with a great experience throughout their customer journey are bound to come out on top.
According to Trustpilot, “a totally satisfied customer contributes 2.6 times as much revenue as a somewhat satisfied customer, and 14 times as much revenue as a somewhat dissatisfied customer.”
So if you’re wondering whether or not customer experience has any impact on how much revenue your brand makes — it absolutely does.
There are many ways to build a better experience for your customers, but since 72% of consumers prefer email communication and the fact that email plays a vital role in nearly every part of the customer journey, using email to improve your CX is also vital.
But one of the upsides here is that you can automate a handful of email methods proven to successfully help your customer experience efforts.
Improve Your Customer Experience With These Email Marketing Automations
Work smarter, not harder.
It’s a common phrase you’ve probably heard a time or two. But the implications of it makes sense for email marketing.
I mean, if you can find a way for your email marketing to help improve your brand and make you more money all on autopilot, wouldn’t you do it?
Of course, you would.
The good news is these automations will help you do that. You probably have some already running for your brand.
However, you may not realize the various ways you can use them to help your customers have the positive experience you wanted to give them.
1. Welcome Email Series + Being Helpful = Happy Customers
Out of all the email automations on this list, welcome emails are probably the most commonly used.
They’re a great way to say ‘hello’ and ‘thank you’ to people who like you enough to give you their email address.
Every welcome email series should be as unique as the brands that send them.
But when you’re focused on providing better CX through email, you can find some new email ideas to add to your sequence or ways to change your current series to be more customer-centric.
A great example of this is by Grammarly.
This welcome email is from their free user series.
But this one, in particular, guides the user through getting started with the Grammarly app. It also gives them links to other tools that they may find handy.
It’s not too much info. It’s just enough to get them started and into the app so they can write better.
The takeaway here is that this email is all about making sure the user has what they need to make the most of this product.
The email is built to be a resource they can revisit with links to things that will help them with this tool.
Whatever you choose to do in your welcome series, aim to be helpful!
2. Be Courteous with Abandoned Cart Emails
Online carts being abandoned is nothing new. It happens every day and I’m sure it happens to your brand more than you like.
Some surveys show that nearly 70% of your site visitors will abandon their cart and leave. That’s why abandoned cart emails are so vital to have as they can regain A LOT of potentially lost revenue.
And while it’s good to try and use these automated emails to get as much money back as you can, you should create these with the aim of providing a good experience too.
Making that slight view shift from “what do I get out of it” to “how can I provide a better experience with this email” can do a lot in helping your abandoned cart emails get the results you really want.
Take this example from Society6.
From the looks of things, someone abandoned their cart :(
But… the tone in the copy does something interesting. Instead of saying something like “Oh no, you forgot something” it reads “We’ve reserved your cart for the next 48 hours.”
The tone is kind and they’re doing something seemingly courteous while also offering a discount to help the checkout process be completed. It’s subtle and kind but both can be very effective in landing sales and improving the way people think about your brand.
//[inject:ad-ebook-abandoned-cart]
3. Send All The Right Transactional Emails
You might not want your receipt from Starbucks every single time you order (let’s save some trees ya’ll), but I bet you look for order confirmation emails after you’ve purchased a product online, don’t you?
I know I do.
My husband and mother-in-law do.
And my 89-year-old grandmother does too. It doesn’t matter the demographic, your consumers are going to be looking for these types of emails.
Why?
Because they instantly validate the assumption that the transaction we just made online went through and was received by the company we ordered from. And for most of us, not getting those would indicate something didn’t go through.
In fact, one study shows that for online orders, “the biggest uncertainty for customers was a lack of order confirmations.”
Making sure this type of email sends out automatically on every order made is an important way to improve the experience your customers have with your brand.
This example from Burst is a great example of what an effective order confirmation email can look like.
We love this design in particular because it shows images of each item ordered and other important information such as the order date, where it’s going to ship to and the total amount billed.
But Order Confirmations aren’t the only type of CX-centric transactional email you should be sending.
Here are a few more transactional emails you may need to consider automating for a better overall customer experience:
- Receipts. These aren’t always the same as order confirmations but they can be depending on your product fulfillment flow. Some brands send an order confirmation when they get it and then another receipt email when they’ve processed the order.
- Shipping notifications (email and SMS). Telling your customers when an order is shipping and even giving them tracking information so they know exactly when that order will arrive is probably in the top three best transactional messages that improve customer experience. These can be both email or SMS if that’s handled through your email marketing provider.
Burst has another good example of shipping notification emails that follow the same branding as their previous email. Which is a good note to keep in mind when creating your own. The “feel” and visual appeal of your emails say a lot about your brand so consider sprucing it up a bit.
- Password resets. This might not apply to every eCommerce brand, but if you have account creation on your site, then you’ll want to make sure you automate sending easy password resets for your customers.
If you don’t have transactional email automations as part of your email marketing, you should seriously consider putting aside the time to build them.
Not only do they help with customer experience, but since they are some of the most opened emails they also have a positive impact on your deliverability and sender score.
Make Customer Experience Even Better With Personalization
All of these email automations above can be used to improve your brand’s overall customer experience. However, you and I both know that adding some of the best personalization tactics to your emails is only going to make these work even better.
One Experian study showed that “personalized emails generate 6x higher revenue than non-personalized emails and increase open rates by 26%.”
Using someone’s first name is a great start, but there are a few other very important ways to improve personalization without coming off as creepy.
You can learn what they are here in this post here, but here’s a quick overview so you get an idea of what this entails:
- Segment your list the right way and as soon as you can.
- Send emails based on user behavior.
- Use video in your emails.
That’s just scratching the surface of what you can do with personalization, but it’s a really great place to start.
//[inject:ad-demo]
Email Marketing and Customer Experience Go Hand In Hand
Customer experience, automation, and email marketing are often thought of as two separate things. But in our day and age, they should work together and support each other for the best outcome.
It can take a bit of time to find the right fit for your brand’s customer experience emails, but trust us — it’ll be worth it.