Communicating by Email

In this topic:

Responding to emails and customer service
General email dos and don’ts
Marketing email advice

Why are emails so important?

More and more customers are shopping, booking and enquiring online, so emails are increasingly the communication method of choice. They are quick, cheap and avoid the need for a direct ‘confrontation’ with a real person.

Responding to emails and better customer service

Although emails are a slightly more ‘relaxed’ method of communication for the customer, they still demand a fast, professional response from the business. A customer may rattle off a quick sentence or two without punctuation or capitals, but they’d be very surprised – and unimpressed – to get one back in the same style.

An email is a chance for you to:

Answer your customer’s enquiry
Pre-empt any further questions
Inject a personal note into an automated booking or ordering service
Get across the ‘tone’ of your business – how friendly, welcoming and capable you are
Provide additional information that really sells your business and area

Below are a set of tips for improving your customer service through email. For general email advice, including general email dos and don’ts, click here. For advice about marketing emails, click here.

Tips for effective customer service through email

Prioritise your emails – have a system
Add the customer email address to your contacts
Reply promptly
Follow up

1. Prioritise your emails – have a system

Businesses – like individuals – get swamped with mail and junk, so finding the emails you really need to reply to can be a task in itself. Try the following:

Use a recognised email or customer management system
Use a system like Outlook or Frontdesk, to store and reply to messages, then you can set up rules and templates to help you sort and respond to mail quickly.
Use different email addresses
Publishing different email addresses helps you separate out types of mail and use rules to sort these messages as they arrive into folders within your inbox. This way you can instantly see the most important messages as they arrive.
- If you are a smaller business consider setting up the following:
  - one customer email address, eg enquiries@mybusiness.co.uk
  - one email address for each of your online ordering or booking systems (so you can instantly see bookings/orders) eg bookings@mybusiness.co.uk or orders@mybusiness.co.uk
  - one supplier email address eg office@mybusiness.co.uk
- If you are a larger business, you may also want to set up and publish emails for different teams, such as your bookings and reservation team, your functions team your group and travel trade teams and so on.
Use automated replies
If you don’t have staff dedicated to answering customer emails and can only check your mail once or twice a day then consider setting up an automated response (this can be very easily done as part of a rule in most popular email and customer management programs). The response should say something along the lines of “Many thanks for your **** (eg email, enquiry, order, booking etc) which we have just received. One of our team will be in touch shortly to **** (eg answer your enquiry, provide the information you asked for, confirm your booking, give you your order details etc).”
Check mail regularly or use alerts
You can set your email program to alert you when new messages come in, but in practice this can be very distracting. You could choose to only alert if the email regards a booking or order (by setting up a rule that works on the email address or subject bar) or you could decide that you will check your mail once every 30 minutes/every hour/twice a morning etc and respond to priority messages immediately. You must also set aside time to respond to non-priority messages – at least once a day. Any less and they build up into a full time job.
Filter for junk – but check regularly
Using spam and junk filters is essential, and if any get into you inbox set up a rule to screen them in the future (most email and customer management programs do this easily, e.g. by choosing an “add to junk” option from your toolbar or from right-clicking on a message).However, junk filters sometimes screen out real messages – no automatic rule is perfect – so check your junk boxes regularly. Preferably, don’t leave it more than once a day or every two days at the most. This keeps the task to a minimum – scan down the list for real messages then delete everything in the box – and prevents real customers who accidentally end up here being kept waiting too long.

2. Add the customer email address to your contacts

For each real enquiry, booking or order you get from a genuine customer, add their email address to your contacts list and customer database. There are two reasons for this:

contacts in your list cannot get accidentally screened as junk
you can easily contact them again, now and in the future for marketing.

If your system allows you to (and if it doesn’t, at least set up a spreadsheet in Excel or similar) collect the following information:

Date
Name
Email
Address or telephone if known
Customer, repeat customer or enquirer
Where they found your contact details, if known – and if you don’t know, ask when you get the chance (eg your website, the tourist information centre, a guide or advert (record which one)
Can they be contacted in the future (the data protection question)

If you can, collect more information about what they are buying or seeking and about their age, lifestyle and interests etc, because the more you know about your customers (and the ones who don’t become customers) the better you can sell your product and the better you can find similar customers.

3. Reply promptly

This should really be number one on everyone’s list. Prompt responses are essential, there is no other way to put it. You will win more business if you respond more quickly to enquiries.

How promptly depends on how you organise your business:

If you have dedicated front of house staff then answer enquiries as soon as you get them – aim for no more than 30 minutes to an hour.
If you don’t have dedicated front of house staff then at the very least reply to enquiries received overnight first thing and then reply to morning enquiries at the end of the morning and afternoon ones at the end of the afternoon.
Try not to think of email as less important than the phone. With a phone call, you can’t help but provide the information there and then – the customer is on the end of the phone. But emails are just as valuable and just as likely to result in business, so try to give near equal priority.
Use automated responses, as described above, to provide a first line of response to enquiries received out of hours or during closed periods.
Never leave your email totally unattended – make sure you’ve got a backup plan (eg another member of staff, family or friend or a ‘virtual reception’ service) if you or the relevant staff are unable to respond through accident, illness or other business eventuality!

4. Use correct English and a friendly but courteous tone

Use good, plain English in your emails and try to go for a friendly but courteous tone. Your emails should sound professional but approachable.

Start with ‘Dear’ (rather than ‘Hi’) and end with ‘Regards’ or ‘Kind regards’ or simply ‘Many thanks’.
If you don’t know your customer’s name then start with something like, “Many thanks for your enquiry, which we received today.”
Avoid becoming over formal or stuffy. Equally, avoid being over-familiar or using text-speak.
See http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/guides.htm for very clear guides to writing good, plain English and check their A-Z of alternative words if you find yourself getting stuck in business-speak.
Use a spellchecker to check for any obvious typos, but always, always read over emails carefully before you send them.
If the email is very important, have someone else read over it before you hit send.
Some people only enter the recipient’s address after the email has been properly checked, to avoid accidentally sending it in an unfinished or un-proofed state.

5. Use templates and signatures

Templates are pre-written emails or parts of emails that you can use to very quickly, effectively and efficiently respond to regular enquiries. Take plenty of time and care setting up templates because you will get return on the time invested over and over again. Make sure they are set out clearly and broken up with bullet points and numbers. Keep the body short, but include lots of extra information at the end of the message (see below)

Templates are very easy to set up. At the simplest, simply create a document with all your templates clearly set out on it, and then copy and paste the relevant template into your reply email whenever you need to. However, some email or customer management programs have special functions built in, making it even easier to set up a range of emails that you can pick from as your reply template, according to the nature of the enquiry.

Signatures

Similarly, almost all email and customer management programs allow you to set up signatures that automatically attach themselves to the end of a new email. This saves you typing the same thing over and over again at the end of each email.

Your signature should obviously have:

your name
position (if appropriate)
the name, email, phone and web address of your business.

It is also customary to have:

a disclaimer at the bottom, words to the effect that this email is intended for the recipient and if you have received it in error please notify us etc. For a full disclaimer example, click here.
additional information, that all customers or enquirers may benefit from, that helps you sell more and promote your area better. (See below, 10 Include additional information).

6. Type a relevant and personal subject line

Everyone gets inundated with email – lots of it junk. Make sure your carefully crafted reply doesn’t get overlooked. Most people just scan the sending address and the subject bars of their incoming mail, and only click on the people they know or the subjects that interest them. So subject bars are very, very important to business emails – yet hardly anyone uses them effectively.

For example:

you could put, “Your booking confirmation”, but better would be “Rosewarn Cottage booking confirmation and useful info”.
for general enquiries you could put, “Re: Your Enquiry” but better would be something along the lines of “Talbot Museum opening times and facilities” or “Events at Penny Gardens in June”.

The subject bar really comes into its own for marketing emails, when the recipient isn’t expecting the communication and so will really need an incentive to open it.

Make sure your business email address is accompanied by your business name.
Most browsers and email programs show about 30 characters of the subject text, with the rest displayed when you hover over it, so make the first few words count.
As an example, instead of “Special Discounts in May” which is too generic try “Kids go free this spring at Woodhouse” or “ 2 nights for 1 at Marlboro B&B” or “Free cream tea at Penny Gardens” etc.

7. Keep the body of the email brief – use numbers and bullets

Although an email communication is a chance to provide lots of additional information that will encourage your customers to buy from you and explore your area, the body of the email – the actual message part – should be kept short and sweet, with any further information neatly organised at the end.

Too much text or blocks of content put readers off.
Keep sentences and paragraphs short and use bullets or numbering to break things up.
Make it possible for a customer to scan down the email and take in the salient points.
Put as much additional, useful information as you want after the sign-off, but make sure to keep this well organised and prioritised too.

As an example:

Good email practice

8. Confirm the information they have given you

When answering customer emails, it is very important to ensure that you’ve understood what the customer wants. The easiest way to do this is to use the first sentence(s) of your reply to summarise the information they have provided and the questions they have asked, eg:

“Dear Mr Jenkins,

Thank you very much for your enquiry regarding accommodation and special diets for you and your family.”

Doing this forces you to pay attention to the detail of their enquiry, and to make sure you cover everything they ask.

9. Answer all customer questions and pre-empt further questions

Next, ensure you answer everything the customer needs, and try to pre-empt further questions by putting yourself in their shoes. In the example above, it would be helpful to:

Confirm the room(s), dates, party, board type etc
Detail what you can provide for breakfast that matches their diet requirements
Mention any other meals you can provide, eg packed lunches, evening meals, gluten-free biscuits etc
Mention special facilities you offer for children or families

10. Include additional useful information

In addition to pre-empting further questions, use the email opportunity to really sell your establishment and your area. If you have offers or special deals, mention them prominently. Beyond the main body of the response – which you should confine to answering the enquiry – you can include all sorts of additional information eg:

Any awards, commendations, affiliations etc (this is 3^rd party endorsement and a great confidence booster for customers)
Key points eg arrival or opening time, check out or last admission, etc
Meal options (eg your meal times or your cafes and restaurants) and special diet info
Your key or special facilities
Directions or link to directions and map
Link to your access statement
If appropriate, links to places to stay (to, for example, a list on your own site if you have one, or at www.visitnortheastengland.co.uk or your local ATP site)
Links to further things to see and do, as above
Links to events, eating out, walks, cycle routes, itineraries etc
Links to weather or tide times

Take time to prepare this additional information in advance and either:

add it to the signature, so it automatically appears at the end of every email,
prepare it as a nicely formatted attachment
or just copy and past it onto the bottom of appropriate emails, as required

11. Ask if you can help further and provide appropriate contact details

Always conclude by making yourself available for further questions by phone or email. Be friendly and approachable - your customers are planning their leisure time, they want to spend it with a business that they believe will ensure they have a great time.

12. Follow up

Don’t forget to follow up enquiries if you don’t hear back from them and the customer doesn’t book or buy. Give it a few days and then send a short, friendly enquiry,eg:

“We hope you’ve got your [stay, day out, activity etc] sorted out, but if there is anything else we can do to help, don’t hesitate to get in touch."

Then, below your name and contact details, you’ve got another opportunity to ‘plug’ your establishment, area and any offers you may have.

Next steps:

You may also want to look at:

Advertising, Marketing & PR