The online eCommerce industry has had an astounding past few years, boosted by the increased dependence on online shopping over the COVID lockdown periods. Yet, even without this forward thrust, eCommerce is a growing industry that shows incredible future growth potential. At present, the industry is accelerating at impressive speeds, with an expected 24% of all sales occurring online by 2026. 

However, not all eCommerce businesses thrive. Although it’s now fairly easy to create and launch an eCommerce store, getting new customers and actually creating traction around a product is a whole other story. Most of the time, eCommerce businesses focus on marketing methods like paid ads or social media ads to generate traffic.

Yet, one of the most effective mediums for eCommerce businesses is actually customer service emails. Customer service emails are a direct form of communication that allows a business to clearly and precisely convey a message to its audience. Beyond just showing off new products, these emails help to build customer loyalty, drive interaction, and increase customer lifetime value.

In this article, we’ll dive into the world of customer service emails, demonstrate their impact on eCommerce businesses, and pinpoint why businesses around the globe are turning to this historical method of marketing communication to drive sales. 

What Are the Benefits of Effective Customer Service for eCommerce Businesses?

Effective customer service allows eCommerce businesses to connect with their customers, drive interaction, and ensure that every single person that reaches out has a positive experience with your business.

Once you’ve defined a customer service strategy, your eCommerce business will be able to access a range of benefits:

• Boosted Customer Engagement – Customer service and support allow you to directly engage with your audience, listening to their concerns and building up helpful networks to quickly respond to any issues they may have.
• Increased Customer Satisfaction – Rapid, precise, and helpful customer service will help to increase customer satisfaction with your brand.
• Higher LTV – By repeatedly pleasing customers, you’re able to ensure they continually buy from your brand, increasing LTV and driving revenue.

Great customer service can be an eCommerce superpower. By focusing on all customer-facing communication channels, you’ll be able to build a more positive brand identity that your customers love.

Tips For Writing Effective Customer Service Emails

Customer service emails should go beyond just responding to complaints and pointing people to the right resources. Customer service should be an active hub for business and client communications, turning into one of the strongest areas of your business.

In order to deliver better customer service emails, focus on the following areas.

Focus on Personalization

The social commerce market is continually expanding, with current estimates seeing this market reach 2.9 trillion US dollars by 2026. As audiences continue to grow, customers are noticing that the quality of responses from customer support agents is decreasing. With the incorporation of AI into email networks and chatbots, responses are now more generic than ever, making customers feel like they’re not being heard or listened to.

In order to deliver a winning customer experience, your customer support emails should focus on personalization as much as possible. Personalization is a winning strategy in the marketing and customer-facing spaces, and will allow you to increase your customer satisfaction scores with ease.

Deliver a unique and personalized experience through email, and your customers will be much more likely to rate your customer support conversations as positive. If you win with customer support, your eCommerce business wins everywhere. 

Use All the Features of an Email

When writing effective customer service emails, most businesses tend to focus on the copy above all else. Of course, what you write in an email is of vital importance, as this is the main bulk of what customers will read. However, if you limit your customer service teams to only having text, then you’re missing out on a large percentage of what you can achieve with emails.

For example, at its most basic, incorporating digital assets into an email will help improve its overall quality. We don’t mean you should insert random stock images, but rather complement what you’re talking about with visual assets linked to your business. You could include photos of a specific product or other graphic mediums that allow you to get your point across more efficiently.

Another fantastic element that every single member of your customer service email team should include is an email sign-off. Beyond just using a polite ending to your email, you can rapidly create effective sign-offs by using an email signature. This space allows your customer service representative to give more information about themselves, while also including further digital and linked assets.

For example, you could include a link to your website in an HTML email signature. What’s more, you could include a link to a survey, allowing your customers to give their opinions about your customer service and leave comments. Additional assets like these give the customer more power to respond to your email.

Instead of just treating customer service emails as blank spaces for text, focus on delivering effective content by maximizing what you include in your emails. 

Speed Comes First

One area of customer service that absolutely cannot be overlooked by eCommerce businesses is the speed of replies. In our digital age, people expect responses as soon as possible, if not immediately after they send off their request. Of course, an instant response may not be realistic for every business.

However, if you’re able to rapidly respond to inquiries, you will be able to increase customer satisfaction and boost the likelihood that the customer will continue to work with your business. While speed isn’t everything in most areas of business, in customer service, it absolutely is. If you need help improving the speed of your communications, issuing response templates that customer service agents can use is an intelligent place to begin.

Final Thoughts

Customer service emails allow businesses to resolve issues, convey information, and share potentially useful products and services with users. By allowing this communications channel to become a central force for an eCommerce business, sellers are able to unlock a whole trove of benefits.

From increasing customer satisfaction to boosting the average lifetime value of a customer, a well-managed customer service email system can do wonders for an online business. Especially in this digital atmosphere, written communication is more important than ever before, with a focus on email allowing online businesses to thrive. 

Don’t overlook email just because it’s a legacy system; it holds incredible potential for eCommerce companies.