Thursday, September 23, 2010

The all important welcome email

We often say in sales and marketing that first impressions count. But no less important than first impressions are lasting impressions.

I am in the process of immigrating to the UK and have taken up services with a bank, as it is the most pressing need – I cannot get an apartment or anything else for that matter without a bank account. I have been less than impressed with the correspondence that has followed my engagement with the bank and unfortunately this is going to be the lasting impression I have of them.

Not a very memorable experience
I gave the bank my email address, but at no point was I welcomed as a new client, nor given the step-by-step guide on what to expect. To be fair I was given brochures regarding the account I opened, but they were promotional, so my immediate reaction was to throw them away as I knew what account I had opted for. Some simple, personalised emails would have made the experience a more memorable one for me and possibly created a customer for life. Here are some emails I would have been happy to receive:
  • Welcome – we're so happy you've joined us. Here are the numbers you need to keep close by...
  • Your card has just been dispatched
  • You haven't logged into Internet Banking yet. How can we help you?
the beginning of my lifecycle with the bank. Understanding Lifecycle Messaging is key to creating masterful relationships with your clients as well as new opportunities for sales.

Simply put, a Lifecycle Messaging strategy is one that looks at key milestones in the relationship you have with your client and structures messaging to occur on those milestones. By ensuring your messaging has a clear purpose, you are able to drive your point home more effectively.
The alternative – which many companies still consider to be the norm – is to communicate only when it is convenient for you, which has no relevance to clients. No wonder clients tire of receiving most communication that comes their way.

And what are those milestones? The anniversary of the day they bought your product or signed up for your service, an upgrade notification, a birthday trigger for example. The most important thing to remember when using these triggers is to personalise and make your first communication special, rather than just sending the normal business-like email message.

The welcome message marks the start of the conversation (and there is nothing like an unexpected introduction to help move things swiftly along.)

As the start of the conversation, a welcome email is also far more likely to be opened. This gives you the perfect opportunity to get your email priority placement in the inbox, with the introduction of the smart inbox within the web email environment. Once the client has interacted with that email (opened / clicked / replied), future emails are likely to get priority placement, rather than being categorised as graymail or unimportant.

Amongst other things, the welcome message should:
  • Give your clients information on what they've just signed up for and what they can expect
  • Give them contact details and service details where applicable
  • Serve as an instant confirmation that the email address exists and is
    valid. Should the email bounce, this is a perfect opportunity to gather
    an updated email address by sending a text, calling the
    member/subscriber or ensuring that a notification appears next time they
    log into your site
Also, since this is the first interaction with your client, you could use the opportunity to get more information from them, such as their desired frequency of communication and their likes and dislikes (depending on the communication you're sending out).

The welcome email isn't only about the start of the relationship, it also encompasses any new services the client has signed up for and should know more about. These include when and how to expect their bills, the process for insurance policies and what can be expected, etc.

These first impressions all form part of the customer's lifecycle with your company and are just as important as the live conversation you have with them. Isn't it time you thought more about making your first impression a lasting one?

I'd love to hear about a proper welcome you've received – or not!

* P.S. Google's new priority inbox is going to affect the way all your client communications are prioritised, so making sure your welcome email gets read is now going to affect the way all your client communications are prioritised...look out for a follow up blog to find out how you can get priority status for your emails.

Mia Papanicolaou
Innovative messaging specialist
striata.com

Thursday, September 16, 2010

Transactional email: the glamorous marketing email's poor cousin

Let's face it . . . in the realm of Customer Lifecycle Communication; the Marketing Email is the glamorous cheerleader, while the Transactional Email is the nerdy science boff.

"What is a transactional email?" I hear you say.

A transactional email is generated automatically when someone interacts with an organisation. Based on what the interaction is, there's a follow up communication sent by email. There are plenty of examples: a confirmation, failure notification, a receipt, an invoice, a booking form.

Transactional emails are like the workhorses of customer communication. They often happen in the background, with little or no attention to their layout, design, and do not adhere to the corporate identity, nor reinforce the brand values. Someone developed the automated trigger message process, and that's the last time anyone paid attention to these emails - the result is
that they fail to provide real value to the business.

Transactional emails could do a much more productive job if treated as a valuable customer touch point. The same rules of email marketing should be applied to the nerdy cousin as to the glamorous prom queen.

Solution

Treat transactional emails as a vital part of a customer's brand experience. Make sure these communications adhere to your brand identity and digital communication guidelines.

Transactional emails include notifications that can be time critical, so keep the message size small and minimise the risk of the message being filtered by adhering to email marketing best practice.

Don't waste the opportunity to use this customer touch point for brand awareness, cross and up-selling and customer engagement (getting feedback).

Keep it simple but use the opportunity to reinforce your brand. And if you don't have the time or resources to do so, leave it to the experts!

Alison Treadaway MD,
Striata SA
striata.com

Thursday, September 9, 2010

Who really pays the bills in this relationship?

Two things that have really been hot topics for me recently are "how many companies are truly listening to their customers?" and "how many look at the full lifecycle of customer communications?"

In terms of the first concept, I'm continually amazed by companies that make technology decisions based purely on "what other companies in the marketplace are doing", rather than asking their own customers what THEY want. After all, who pays the bills - your customers or your competitors?

Analyze this:


Total paperless billing adoption in the US averages less than 15%, yet more than 80% of the bill
paying population has access to email. Perhaps all those other companies aren't getting it right either.

At Striata, we spend a considerable amount of time and energy getting to know our clients and
their customers before any engagement. Very often we recommend conducting a customer survey on how they would prefer to receive bills, statements and other communications. Almost inevitably the team responsible for that client's eBilling / eDelivery strategy find the results surprising! .


Case in point:

One of our
largest telecom clients has offered online billing for quite some time.
Customers have to click on a link in an email and log-in to view and pay
each bill. However, in order to get over the adoption plateau that
virtually every biller hits with this portal-based approach, Striata
suggested augmenting their portal with PUSH eBilling. They liked the idea and decided to survey their customers.

The Result:

50% more customers would prefer to receive their bill attached to an email
, as opposed to an email with a link back to the portal.

And, in another online survey, consumers were asked how they would like to receive their electronic bills. THREE times as many consumers said they would prefer to receive a secure email attachment of their bill as opposed to those prepared to log-in to the biller's portal.

What this should tell you is that email is your customer's preferred communication channel, which brings me to my next hot button, "customer lifecycle communication".

Think bigger picture

In my experience, most companies don't give nearly enough attention to how they can sync up all of their transactional, marketing and notification-type communications. The net result is that customers receive emails for some correspondence (like newsletters and marketing) and paper for everything else. Not a great customer experience.

Striata's core strength lies in our ability to not only deliver all communications electronically from a single system, but also to compile a profile on each customer and provide usable data back to each department (billing, marketing, customer service etc).

Gathering information on preferences for how customers want to receive correspondence, which products and services they are most interested in and which banners, buttons and other links they click on puts you in an infinitely stronger position. With this usable data you can sell more to
existing customers, reduce costs (such as paper and postage) and most importantly provide even better customer service (which leads to higher retention.)

What is the value of an email address?

Customers have been willing to provide their email address for years. But very few companies take this for what it's worth. Once you have permission to use their email address, it's critical that you leverage this extremely powerful and very cost effective medium for as many pieces of communication as you can, not just for bills.

If you aren't already using triggered communications or treating all customer interactions as part of a carefully mapped out customer lifecycle management (CLM) program, isn't it time you started?

Want to get more out of your billing relationship with clients? Talk to one of our eBilling specialists today

Barrie Arnold
Vice President of Sales - Striata North America
www.striata.com

Thursday, September 2, 2010

Make it an eBilling evolution, not a revolt

My Google Alert keyword search turned up an interesting forum discussion from Malaysia last week. Someone was upset that a mobile operator there had introduced a US$0.88 charge for sending out a paper bill because eBilling is now available to their customers. Nothing unusual, but I noticed that as I read down the postings (or in most cases, rantings), the rhetoric became more heated and passionate. What started off as a fairly reasonable, minor complaint ended up with the company being lambasted for being unethical and greedy; for profiteering and introducing illegal charges! Based on this forum, the poor company appears to be second only to Al Qaeda in the Axis of Evil! And I'm sure their Public Relations department has since been in a spin, trying to contain the fall-out!

But the thing is that none of this was necessary. In the interests of fairness and accuracy, I did add my tuppence worth to this discussion; rather more reasonable and along the lines of:

The issue here is really relating to how the company has gone about this change to their billing practices. It may or may not be illegal for them to introduce a charge without telling the customer - I'll leave that for better informed people than me to decide - but they certainly need to manage the customer relationship better to take the sting out of any additional charges being levied.

What's required is a customer adoption strategy designed to get customers to sign up for (cheaper, greener) eBilling without upsetting them or indeed inciting them to raise class-action law suits, as has happened in the USA recently.


3 things I'd consider critical here:

1. Inform the customer in advance of any change to T&Cs that will result in additional charges
2. Always allow the customer to make a choice, either to opt-in, or to opt-out of eBilling
3. Make your eBill so good that most customers will actually want to receive their bill that way! Include interactivity to allow customers to analyse their usage, add relevant, targeted marketing , include a payment form for ease of payment and add graphs etc. All the things you can't do with paper bills.

Approached properly, the change to eBilling should work well for telcos (and banks and utilities), customers and the environment – a win-win-win solution.

Stories like this should be a thing of the past, but until companies realise that there's more to eBilling than just a webpage or an email; until they add value to their eBill offering; until they realise that customer psychology needs to be considered when pushing for paper turn-off, we can expect more revolts.

Is your eBilling strategy focused on the "customer experience"?

Keith Russell
Sales Director - Asia Pacific
striata.com