5 tips to nail your customer emails and build trust in your brand

Whether you send one or 1,000 customer emails each day, it is crucial that you don’t lose sight of how important each one is – that every email is an important relationship-building tool for your business, writes Jenn Donovan, marketing coach and co-founder of Spend With Us.

Consider that your email might be the only communication that customer gets from you on a particular day. That email can not only change their relationship with your business (perhaps one step closer to ‘love’ and ‘loyalty’) but, written correctly, can impact their day on a much deeper level.

Getting customer emails right is worth the investment of time.

Regardless of your automation system, there are some must-haves in every email that can (re)shape the way a customer feels about your business.

An email – automated or not – should be as close to two people having a conversation as possible. This makes your customers feel they are doing business with a human. So many businesses miss this mark.

5 important tips to remember when it comes to EACH and EVERY email you write

1. Personalisation matters

Firstly, and quite obviously, is personalisation. Making every single email personal is so important.

Aside from using the recipient’s name in the salutation, use it elsewhere in the email – fittingly, of course. As Dale Carnegie said in his book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, “… remember that a person’s name is, to that person, the sweetest and most important sound in any language.”

2. Humanise your business

Ensure the email is coming from a human – not just a team. ‘Many thanks, Max’ is much better than ‘Many thanks, Customer Service Team’.

Put a face to the name, too. Not only will a photo help build trust and increase conversions, but it will also make your customers feel like they are dealing with real people.

3. Show gratitude

Always, always say thank you. No matter what the email you are sending is responding to – a complaint, a compliment, an enquiry or feedback – say thank you. All (good) business owners acknowledge that even the worst feedback is helpful feedback that can be used to grow your business.

4. Positive language

Look at your language – are you using positive language? Do you have sentences such as ‘actually, you can find that product here if you click’, or ‘I understand, but …’?

Taking out words such as ‘actually’ and ‘but’ can change the tone of your emails. Saying instead, ‘absolutely we do! You’ll find it here’ and ‘I really appreciate your point, unfortunately …’ can make such a big difference to the mood your customer leaves in after their dealings with you.

If your emails are a sales conversation, and you use the words ‘I’ and ‘we’, you are talking about yourself – not your customer. As the saying goes, “customers don’t care what you know until they know you care”. If you are telling them everything about you, I guarantee the information is not getting consumed. A sales email needs to be telling the customer:

what you can do for them
what the outcome will be for them
how much revenue or free time it will generate for them

To achieve this, it’s important to use words like ‘you’ and ‘your’ instead.

5. Your tone

Lastly, the tone of the email – is it formal or casual? It has been a long-held debate over which is the preferable tone. But a recent survey of 2,000+ online customers found that 65 per cent of them, across all ages and all genders, preferred a casual, more friendly tone in customer emails.

Of course, if you are delivering bad news to a customer a casual tone may not be appropriate, so ensure you use the right tone for the right purpose. But a casual tone can help humanise an email and create trust.

Remember, you can automate processes but automating relationships is much harder. While an email is not the same as a face to face conversation, the end result should still be your customer feeling like they had a personal experience with your brand or business, and excited to do business with you again.

Each email might be a bit of effort, but it’s a massive opportunity to build better relationships, grow your customer base and continue the personal experiences your customers enjoy.

Want more? Get our newsletter delivered straight to your inbox! Follow Kochie’s Business Builders on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

Now read this: