There are a number of significant advantages of using emails in the context of business, particularly concerning cost, speed and efficiency in communication. It is one of the most preferred choices for deploying flexible communication channels, including customer support services. Email is also global, and using it is an inexpensive way to reach out to more customers anywhere in the world.
Leveraging your business through emails is effective since it involves proactive interaction between you and your customer. Customers can express their concerns better using emails, especially when telephone lines are busy, or they don’t have time to engage in conversations or face to face meetings at the moment. Customers can also document their conversations through emails, especially when there are certain agreements or guarantee for action involved.
On the side of the business, emails can enable both marketing and valuable content to exist in one message. This way, businesses can maximize its use.Marketers can also benefit from customer data that email interactions can return, such as email and attachment clicks and downloads (through email tracking tool), customer preferences, customer profile and other useful pieces that can make business know their customers better. Through this, the benefits become mutual, and businesses can make targeted and engaging email content, and at the same time, customers receive what is relevant to their needs.
Also, one notable advantage of using emails is its implication in the environment. Paperless transactions contribute less to the deterioration our natural resources (with an exception to carbon footprint, which is an indirect result of some advances in technology). People nowadays are becoming environmentally conscious that more ways were developed to avoid careless consumption of depletable resources like trees, fossil fuel and oil.
While there are always two sides of the story, the use of email in the business is still being optimized in order to make the tides turn in favor into using it. Even though it is revolutionary on its own, it still takes discipline, knowledge, and skills to manage emails well and gain its full benefits.
Effective Email Management System
Email management is important in making emails work for the benefit of the business and its clients. It is a key indicator of how well a business renders its services in favor of its clients’ needs as its priority. Take note that customers nowadays are better informed about their needs, and the existing vendors that can satisfy it. Every inquiry or initiation from a potential customer is crucial, and must be appropriately handled in order to have the best results. When using an email to respond, these are the requirements that must be fulfilled in order to better address the opportunity:
- Response efficiency
This involves quick and efficient response to a customer’s inquiry without regard to the volumes of emails that the business is receiving every day.
- Response accuracy
In addition to a quick response, the content of the email should be personal, upbeat and relevant to the concern raised by the customer.
- Sustained and lasting business-client relationship
Customers should always feel that addressing their needs is of utmost importance to the business, regardless if it is simple or elaborate. Building a lasting business-client relationship starts with an effective 2-way communication between them, and is vital in expanding the business’ loyal customer base.
Client Based Email Challenges
The use of a traditional email server set up in a business is quite challenging due to its lack of a framework, and a defined set of standards and policy guidelines to observe. To be able to handle larger volumes of emails, a collaborative work approach should be implemented, which cannot be sustained by a typical email server. The need for a centralized and regulated email management system is strongly adhered, in order to eliminate these traditional email use drawbacks in the business setting:
- Difficulty in monitoring employee productivity in handling business emails.
- Lack of a systematic and organized workload distribution of emails to process among customer support people.
- The history of customer support conversations and messages are not centrally stored.
- There is a limited infrastructure for storage, backup, and archiving of emails and its attachments.
- It is very challenging to deploy collaboration, which should have promoted teamwork and collaborative learning as well.
- Inability to access emails outside of the office facility due to lack of centralized email management system.
- Customer contacts and information aren’t stored centrally.
- No reporting and analysis capability because executing tasks and workloads are isolated.
Benefits of Using Email Management Tools
A suite of tools and features for an effective email management system is contained in an email management tool. Email management tools are technology and web based programs that direct the flow of emails within the organization in a streamlined approach. It makes use of a centralized platform, which can host a gamut of benefits to assist in managing their business emails, and its associated documents and processes.
Automation is a tricky aspect of technology. Improper application of the automation process can lead to an impersonal, sort of robotic, approach to customers, which may turn them off. Automation in email management software is rather focused on simpler but repetitive tasks which doesn’t concern the email content itself.
Deploying email management tools in your business can give you the following benefits:
- Routing capability
During email reception, emails traditionally go through the process of spam filtering to make sure that you receive them “clean” (without viruses, or the message isn’t corrupted) in the email server. Subjecting emails to email routers can provide additional backup and sorting capability to the existing tools in the email server. Mail routing works by duplicating the email and sending the copy to an additional email archive outside of your existing system. This can help in departmentalizing emails according to purpose, sender, or other rules that can be implemented. It can also make locating important emails faster, because they are categorized.
- Centralized data and information management
Gathering all substantial information from customer data will enable an inbox management software to build a centralized database of answers to common customer inquiries and frequently asked questions (FAQ) that can be re-used by employees. Through this, they can have increased productivity and gain better control on their responses.
- Incident tracking
Incident tracking is a powerful email consolidation method that is effective in treating incident related groups of emails as a single flow of correspondence. This way, there is better handling of customer interaction which can also increase the level of the personal approach. This back end benefit can also make sure that no important email details are overlooked.
- Historical approach in email messages
This pertains to the capability of email management app to let the user view emails as a steady stream of conversation instead of individual messages, which requires more time to click and locate. This viewing perspective can also enable the employees to have a sense of continuity with the interaction and that conversations are always in context.
- Alerts and notifications
Email management tools are also able to send alerts and notifications about important status of the email server like unmanageable or there is an unusually heavy volume of emails received, response times to emails are not met, when an email is received, or you’ve been given an email to answer.
- Adoption of policies and standards for email use
Having a standard and set of policies to govern all aspects of email use and management allow your business to have a uniform approach to responses to emails for a more professional impression. Enforcing policies can also encourage accountability and responsible email use.
- Reporting and analysis capable
There is a great opportunity to get customer data out of emails and email interactions. Out of this sea of data, a business can gain insights and potentials to improve, optimize, and innovate. This can also help in making a more custom fit and relevant customer experience with every transaction or service rendered.
- Remote, browser based access
Email management software makes it easy for businesses to access their email server anywhere through any popular internet browsers. This allows greater flexibility in accessing, and an extra mile to achieve superior customer service performance.
- Email monitoring collaboration
Adopting email management tools can initiate a collaborative email management system, wherein employees can experience a more systematic and organized work distribution and execution, which is constantly monitored to ensure a high quality of service rendered to customers. Collaboration can also encourage team work in addressing difficult queries or situations, which can also contribute to the learning experiences of the employees as a team.
- End to end monitoring
Email management tools such as an email tracking software, can help gain conversions from customers by enabling links to be embedded in an email that when clicked, will return metrics to the business for further analysis. The best email tracking software is smart enough to isolate your profile by referring it as a significant object of interest and pursue ways to get to know you better through your journeys in the web.
Conclusion
In a 2014 survey about digital marketing tactics, email ranked number one as the most effective among the methods on the list. The spot was nailed at 54%, with website/blogs and search engine optimization (SEO) came in second and third place respectively at 48% and 47%. But this survey has an interesting detail; it also showed the most difficult method to implement, which put the email as third to the last (out of 8 methods included) on the list, at 11%. This just goes to show that email is still up and running in terms of the opportunities in the business. Challenges are always part of any endeavor, but these also encourage us to keep on creating and developing more innovations for the future.
Get intimate with email management tools by checking out these reviews of email tracking software and email management software here.
Jeev Trika
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