You’ll walk away with five ways to improve your customer care efforts and the tools you need to do it.

Email marketing isn’t just about driving conversions and increasing sales.

It can also be a valuable tool for businesses that are looking to improve customer care. Whether you do that through advanced segmentation, dynamic content, predictive marketing technology, or simply by building a stronger customer relationship — email marketing can help you achieve your goals.

In this article, we’ll take a deep dive into five things you can easily implement into your customer care strategy and then provide you with a list of email marketing platforms that can help you create and manage these campaigns.

Here’s a quick look at the five tips we’ll cover:

• Make an effort to solve your customer pain points
• Integrate personalization into your messages
• Collet customer feedback to identify improvement opportunities
• Automate replies for quick response times
• Don’t just sell products, build relationships

5 Ways to Provide Your Email Subscribers with the Best Customer Care

Many companies put all of their eggs into one bucket — pushing sales. But if you want to successfully keep your customers around and build solid relationships with them, you need to also focus on how you care for those customers.

These days, people are pretty savvy and know when a company is only trying to sell them products without trying to connect with them as individuals, and that is a turn-off for many people.

In today’s world, customers are willing to spend more money for a better customer experience. That’s why improving your customer care efforts should no longer be a secondary thought for your business.

In this section, we’ll take a look at five things you can do to improve your email marketing efforts to elevate your customer care and build a better reputation among your customers.

1. Make an Effort to Solve Your Customer Pain Points

Understanding who your customers are and what their pain points are is essential in email marketing.

Not only will this provide you with opportunities to serve product-related content based on this information, but it will also give you insight into how you can improve their overall experience and satisfaction with your brand.

When trying to identify a customer’s pain point, you need to think about the situation from their perspective.

Think about things like — what are the problems they are running into throughout their purchasing journey? How can you elevate these pain points and make their experience with your brand better?

Following these do’s and don’ts will help you find out what your customers’ pain points are. It’s important to use actual customer research and work to earn the trust of your customers rather than make assumptions. Image courtesy of CoSchedule.

Identifying what these pain points are will help you build a customer care strategy that puts the customer’s needs first, which will result in higher customer satisfaction.

There are many different pain points to consider, these are a few of the most common types to consider:

• Financial pain points: things like subscription fees, the high cost of repeat purchases
• Productivity pain points: things that hinder the customer’s ability to perform an activity productively
• Support pain points: this is directly related to a customer not receiving the customer service they need through their journey or during a purchase

 According to Nextiva, 52% of consumers have made an additional purchase from a company after a positive customer service experience.

That means the more you know about what pain points your customers are experiencing, the better you can build your email marketing strategy to improve it, resulting in higher repeat customers and sales.

2. Integrate Personalization Into Your Messages

When trying to find ways to make your brand’s customer care strategy stand out, personalization is a great place to start.

91% of consumers polled stated they’re more likely to do business with a brand that remembers, recognizes, and provides them with relevant recommendations and offers.

Integrating personalization into your email marketing messages will provide customers with the content they want to receive. The more relevant the message is to their specific needs, the more likely they are to interact with it and open your emails in the future.

Personalization can be used across various areas of your business, but the two most commonly used areas are marketing and customer service. That’s because relevant content gives users the information they want and need at every stage of their journey. Image courtesy of SuperOffice.

Using this practice will allow you to serve content that directly relates to the pain points you’ve identified, recent customer behaviors, and predicted future needs.

Using personalization as part of your customer care strategy will require you to have good intel on your audiences. You’ll need to actively collect and understand real-time customer data to keep your content as relevant as possible.

Here are three personalization strategies that can help you improve customer satisfaction:

• Delivery individualized content in real-time
• Deliver localized content
• Personalize the experience across all channels, not just email

While these strategies are a good starting place, they’re not the only options available. Once you start to digest all the data you have on your customers, you’ll be able to identify trends and personalization opportunities.

From there, you can scale up your personalization efforts with automation, segmentation, and the right email marketing platform.

3. Collect Customer Feedback to Identify Improvement Opportunities 

Collecting direct customer feedback through surveys and polls will provide you with invaluable insights that will allow you to improve your current email marketing efforts significantly.

A customer feedback strategy will present you with the opportunity to take insights directly from your customers and put them into action.

The benefits of collecting customer feedback are plentiful, but improving customer satisfaction and loyalty are at the top of the list. But don’t let that limit what you learn from this data. Tap into all the other benefits to improve your business across the board. Image courtesy of ventana research.

Without this type of correspondence, you’ll simply be guessing what the wants and needs of your customers are. Of course, you can make educated assumptions based on tracked behaviors and interactions, but nothing compares to direct feedback.

The challenging part is knowing what to ask your audiences to ensure you’re gathering the most relevant and beneficial feedback. Here’s a list of some of the best customer feedback questions:

• What is your main goal for using this product?
• What is your greatest concern about our product or brand?
• How could we have gone above and beyond for you?
• Why did you choose to use our product over other options?
• What do you like least?
• What are your main concerns or questions about our products?

By asking these types of questions, you’ll learn about how a customer sees your brand, products, and services all at once. From there, you can take the feedback to find process improvements or even identify new products that you can add to your offering.

4. Automate replies for quick response times

Your customers expect that you’ll respond within a reasonable amount of time when they reach out to your brand.

One survey found that while some customers are okay waiting 24 hours for a response, 31.2% of customers want an answer to their question within an hour.

While that may be manageable if you’re a small business with a relatively small subscriber list, this will become harder and harder once you grow a substantial fan base. Sooner or later, you’ll need to find a new way to ensure you’re meeting the expectations of your customers.

Auto-responders are a great solution to this problem.

Auto-responder emails are a great way to keep customer care in mind. These let a customer know that you’ve received their message and can be populated to respond to common questions to provide a quicker response time. But when they can’t resolve the issue—knowing, they set expectations for the customer on when they will hear back from a representative. Image courtesy of Campaign Monitor.

An auto-responder will immediately provide your customer with a response to their question. While they may not solve all of the problems your customers are experiencing, you can identify some of the most common scenarios and have answers ready for them.

Think about these as questions like:

• What are your store hours?
• How do I make a return?
• I haven’t received my product, what should I do?

Having questions like this already pre-populated as auto-responders will likely resolve a large number of inquiries you receive.

Of course, there will always be out-of-the-box questions that you can’t plan for. For these types of questions, you can have these questions sent to your internal teams to respond to. When this scenario occurs, make sure to provide your customers with clear expectations on how long it will take for someone to respond.

5. Don’t Just Sell Products, Build Relationships

Email marketing is a great channel to build relationships with your customers. Building relationships with your customers is vital to improving customer satisfaction and growing your business.

Strong customer relationships can increase sales and reduce customer attrition. Meaning that if you skip this step, you’re missing a significant opportunity to grow your business and identify new brand evangelists.

If you’re one of those businesses that want to increase the customer experience in the next five years, then you’ll want to take a look at your current customer relationships. By focusing on the connections, you build with your customers. You can take your customer experience from okay to excellent. Image courtesy of SuperOffice.

There’s a lot of competition out there when you think about how many emails your customers receive a day. That means that finding ways to stand out and build relationships with your customers is even more important.

You want them to want to open your emails when they see your brand name in the “from” line over your competitors. Having a loyal fan base will help you achieve this goal every time.

 So how do you build relationships with your customers? Here are a few ways you can start building relationships with your customers through email marketing:

• Communicate with them, not at them, and make that communication feel personal
• Be welcoming and make your content inviting to the customer, so they want to continue reading it
• Keep it brief, you don’t want to take up too much of their time, or they may not want to open your messages in the future
• Make the content relevant to the needs of the customer and add something of value for them
• Be consistent, but don’t overshare and annoy your customers with too many emails

These relationship-building efforts won’t go unnoticed when it comes to customer care. Your customers will remember that your brand has taken the time to get to know them and will be more satisfied with your brand.

It will also allow you to gather even more customer data to improve personalization and communications with these customers in the future.

Email Marketing Platforms That Can Make Managing Customer Care Easier

Now the question is, how do you do all of this at scale — all while still managing your email marketing efforts that are revenue driven?

It’s all about the tools you have. To be successful in all of your email endeavors, you’ll want to invest in a marketing automation platform that makes it simple. To help you start—knowing, identifying a platform that will fit your needs, we’ve compiled a list of a few platforms you may want to consider.

Listrak

If you’re looking for an email marketing tool that will help you improve customer care, then look no further than Listrak. This tool will provide you with everything you need to understand who your audiences are, where they’re at in their customer journey, and what they’ll need in the future. These insights will allow you to build customer care campaigns accordingly and customize each message for the recipient it’s intended for.

Listrak is an excellent option for businesses of all shapes and sizes. The specialized team will help you identify the best solution for your needs.

Go above and beyond with your customer care solutions. By integrating personalization and predictive technology into your marketing strategy, you can build campaigns that will resonate with your audiences at every stage of their journey. Image courtesy of Listrak.

Here’s how Listrak can help you improve your email marketing customer care strategy:

• Customer journey orchestration capabilities that allow you to build data-driven, intelligent journeys based on real-time customer behaviors to ensure you’re giving your customers what they need at the right moment
• Abandonment messages that remind customers about the items they left behind in their cart or products they recently purchased to keep your brand top of mind during their search
• Intelligent trigger campaigns that know precisely what a customer needs based on their real-time interactions and behaviors and then automatically sends the right message at the right time without manual intervention
• Predictive marketing technology to help you catch a glimpse into the future needs of your customers and provide them with the content they need before they even know they need it

Pricing: Listrak offers customized pricing based on business needs.

SendX

SendX is an affordable email marketing software that will allow you to connect with your customers and provide them with improved customer service capabilities. From building campaigns based on each customer’s purchasing journey to reaching new subscribers and enrolling them into welcome campaigns to increase engagement — it’s all possible.

This platform—knowing is well suited for smaller businesses and provides very reasonable pricing options to help you reach your customer care goals through email marketing.

Build customer journeys that can adjust based on how your customers are engaging with them. Knowing what content to send and when is key to reaching audiences at the moment right when they needed it the most. Image courtesy of SendX.

Here’s how SendX can help you improve your email marketing customer care strategy:

• Develop customer care email campaigns that engage and nurture your customers through their purchasing journey
• Grow your subscriber list with things like popup forms and landing pages, then add those new audiences to welcome campaigns to keep them engaged with your content
• Automate email marketing efforts with drip sequences, automation on user activity,  audience segmentation, and more to ensure you’re sending the right message, to the right customer, at the right time
• Make email creation and personalization a breeze with the drag and drop email editor that offers pre-built templates designed to encourage engagement and conversion

Pricing: SendX has multiple plan options based on the number of subscribers you have, the following prices are based on annual billing:

• 1-1,000 subscribers — $7.49 per month
• 1,001 – 2,500 subscribers — $14.99 per month
• 2,501 – 5,000 subscribers — $29.99 per month
• 5,001 – 10,000 subscribers — $44.99 per month
• 10,001 – 15,000 subscribers — $59.99 per month
• Customized plans are also available

Website: https://www.sendx.io/

iContact

This platform will help you improve your customer care email marketing efforts by giving you everything you need in one central location. From making personalization simple to sending autoresponders to your most asked questions, the needs of your customers will always be at the forefront of your email marketing.

iContact is another platform that is well suited for small businesses and offers a wide range of solutions to improve the entire customer experience.

Get to know your customers on a personal level and the possibilities will be endless. By understanding each customer individually, you can create customized campaigns that speak to their needs and keep them coming back for more. Image courtesy of iContact. 

Here’s how iContact can help you improve your email marketing customer care strategy:

• Easily integrate personalization and customized messages into your email marketing strategy with the help of intuitive personalization and automation tools
• Automate emails with scheduling capabilities to keep your customers up-to-date on things like payment reminders to make sure to wish them a happy birthday
• Re-engagement emails that allow you to identify and win back inactive users, then successfully bring them back into your active subscriber base
• Autoresponders to ensure that a customer always hears back from your business on their inquiry in a reasonable timeframe with the content they’re looking for

Pricing: Pricing is based on the number of contacts you have. The following prices are the starting prices for businesses with 1,500 contacts:

• The Standard plan — $15 per month
• The Pro plan — $30 per month
• Customized plans are available for businesses with more than 50,000 contacts

Website: https://www.icontact.com/

AutoPilot

AutoPilot is an email marketing automation platform that will provide you with all the tools you need to communicate with your customers and improve customer satisfaction. Whether you’re looking for a solution for scheduling and automation or need something that allows you to tap into personalization — AutoPilot has what you need.

This tool is a great solution for businesses of all sizes and can help you increase customer care and drive an increase in sales and revenue.

Personalization has never been easier. With merge tags, AutoPilot allows you to identify various customer insights and use those to improve the content you’re serving them. From basic information like names to previously viewed products — you’ll have a full view of each customer. Image courtesy of AutoPilot.

Here’s how AutoPilot can help you improve your email marketing customer care strategy:

• Integrate personalization into your messages to give customers the information they want, from order details to personalized content based on customer interests throughout the messages
• Use eCommerce content blocks to share relevant products and provide recommendations based on previous shopping behaviors
• View all of your email campaigns on one centralized calendar to ensure you’re sending emails to your customers at the right frequency and not bombarding them with marketing messages
• Send emails to your subscribers based on their time zone, a fixed window, or designate a specific time and date

Pricing: There are four plan options available, including:

• The Free plan
• The Campaign plan — $29 per month
• The Pro plan — $99 per month
• The Business plan — $299 per month

Website: https://autopilotapp.com/email-marketing

Drip

Drip is a marketing automation platform that can help you to elevate your email marketing and improve your customer care efforts all at once. With tools that allow you to automate messages, know what customers are interested in, and react to their real-time behaviors, you’ll be able to provide the right message at the right moment.

Drip is an excellent tool for businesses of all sizes and has the tools you need to continue growing your business with a customer-centric mindset.

Automating is a powerful email marketing tool that you’ll want in your marketing stack. It will allow you to engage with customers at scale and set rules around when they receive certain messages versus others. Image courtesy of Drip.

Here’s how Drip can help you improve your email marketing customer care strategy:

• Easily create personalized messages with the simplified visual email builder to ensure you’re incorporating the most relevant customer data into each message
• Send email campaigns like welcome messages, abandoned cart emails, and more to target your audiences with the exact content they need based on their purchasing intent
• Use the customer data you have available to create behavioral-based recommendations to share products that can help solve the pain points of your customers
• Automate email sending to save your teams time and make sure that your messages land in your customer’s inbox at the right moment

Pricing: Pricing for the Drip platform is based on the number of subscribers on your list, starting at $19 monthly for 1-500 contacts and increasing from there.

Website: https://www.drip.com/

MailerLite

The MailerLite email marketing platform will provide you with everything you need to improve customer satisfaction and reach your customers at the right moment. With advanced tools that can help you develop, automate, and manage your email marketing campaigns — you’ll be able to focus your efforts on the needs of your customers.

While MailerLite is a platform that businesses of all sizes can use, it’s a great option for small businesses looking for an affordable way to manage their emails and leave room for future growth.

Building customized campaigns to reach your audiences from the moment they become a customer through their entire purchasing journey will help improve their experience and brand satisfaction. Having a tool to manage these campaigns will make it easier and more effective to reach larger audiences with less work. Image courtesy MailerLite.

Here’s how MailerLite can help you improve your email marketing customer care strategy:

• Make the email creation process a breeze with the drag and drop editor that allows you to easily integrate all of the essential elements your customers want to see
• Automate email sending to ensure you’re keeping your audiences engaged and connecting with them at the right moments
• Use personalization and segmentation capabilities to keep your emails as relevant as possible by understanding the wants, needs, and pain points of your customers on an individual level
• Track campaign results to identify what users are most engaged, what geographical areas are most active, and how people are interacting with your email content through click maps

Pricing: Pricing for this platform is based on the number of subscribers you have, plan pricing includes:

• 0 – 1,000 subscribers — $10 per month
• 1,001 – 2,500 subscribers — $15 per month
• 2,501 – 5,000 subscribers — $30 per month
• 5,001 – 10,000 subscribers — $50 per month

Website: https://www.mailerlite.com/

Moosend

With the help of Moosend, you’ll be able to build email marketing campaigns that drive results and build relationships with your customers in the process. Having the ability to send the right message at the right time will improve the customer experience and provide your audiences with the communication they need.

Moosend is a great email marketing platform for businesses of all sizes.

Know how to better optimize your future campaigns by looking at the metrics of your current and past efforts. This will help you learn what works and what doesn’t work for your subscriber base and will allow you to improve your customer care efforts continuously. Image courtesy of Moosend.

Here’s how Moosend can help you improve your email marketing customer care strategy:

• Put your marketing campaigns on autopilot with automation workflows that move customers through their purchasing journey based on their interactions with your brand
• Send  spot-on personalized messages by tapping into customer data and building relevant messages based on customer purchasing behaviors
• Track each step your user takes throughout their entire purchasing journey and decode those steps to provide relevant email marketing communications
• See how your customers are engaging with your campaigns in real-time to identify areas of opportunity to maximize ROI and better serve the needs of your customers

Pricing: There are three plan options, and the specific pricing is based on the number of subscribers you have. The following plan prices are based on 1,000 subscribers:

• The Free plan
• The Pro plan starting at $8 per month
• The Enterprise plan that has customized pricing

Website: https://moosend.com/

Ontraport

Ontraport is a marketing automation platform that will provide you with all the essential email marketing tools you need to improve your current customer care efforts. From gaining a better understanding of who your audiences are to creating your customers’ pain points automated workflows that provide them with the most relevant content based on their position in the purchasing funnel — it can all be done.

Ontraport is a good tool for small to medium-sized businesses looking for a reasonably priced platform that can grow with their needs.

Understanding the health of your subscriber list is essential. If you’re putting all your effort into sending campaigns to audiences who are unengaged and uninterested, you might be wasting valuable time that you could be focusing on actively engaged subscribers. Image courtesy of Ontraport.

Here’s how Ontraport can help you improve your email marketing customer care strategy:

• Ensure your emails are sent and delivered to each of your customer’s inboxes with deliverability tools
• Know exactly where your customer attribution takes place and use this to enroll audiences into nurturing welcome campaigns
• Use real-time customer interactions to help drive communication and provide your audience with the content they want and need based on their pain points
• Keep customer data top of mind and build customized workflows based on the interactions of each of your subscribers to keep messages relevant based on their location in the purchasing journey

Pricing: There are four plan options available, including:

• The Basic plan costing $79 per month
• The Plus plan costing $147 per month
• The Pro plan costing $297 per month
• The Enterprise plan costing $497 per month
• There are customized plan offerings for businesses that need additional services beyond what these plans have to offer

Website: https://ontraport.com/

It’s Time to Put Customer Care at the Forefront of Your Email Marketing Campaigns

So there you have it — keeping your customer care strategy front and center will benefit your business in more ways than one, and you’ll be building a more substantial, more loyal subscriber base in the process.

Improving your customer care will result in improved satisfaction ratings and happier customers. These are two things that will then directly impact your bottom line and drive increased revenue.

All you have to do to get started is make the decision to shift your gears and start thinking about how you can provide a better experience for your audiences. By implementing some of these tips and investing in a marketing platform that can handle all of your needs, you’ll be on the road to building a successful customer care initiative.