The title of this blog post might seem like a bit of a no-brainer. Kind of a “well, duh. If I don’t respond to customer emails then I will lose revenue,” moment. However, the fact that we have to write this blog post should tell you something about today’s email marketing environment. To be point blank, the reality of the situation is simple.
The average person sends and receives 121 emails per day. Let’s look at an hour figure to put this number into perspective. The average person spends 13 hours of their work week (based on a 45 hour work week) composing and responding to work emails — not to mention the hours spent on personal email communications. Let’s go one step further to look at the number of words that are typed during those email correspondences. On average, a person will send and receive approximately 42,000 emailed words per year. To put this into perspective, the average novel has 90,000 words. And so the average person reads and / or writes half a novel in email correspondence on a yearly basis.
Now let’s look at the title of this blog again. “Ignoring Customer Emails Leads to Lost Revenue.” Suddenly, with 13 hours of your week spent on emails, you might be able to see how a few lost emails could slip through the cracks. You know the ones — the emails that you read on your way out of the office, or during your commute, or on your lunch break, or any time of the day when you couldn’t type out a response right then and there. The problem with your failure to respond, is that your customer, you know the one that you forgot to email back right away, well he happens to be equally as busy as you. In fact, he’s so busy, he’s probably working on the second half of that email novel right now.
Don’t Ignore Customer Emails
The moral of the story is simple: if you don’t want to lose customers and you don’t want to lose revenue, then don’t ignore customer emails. In case you need additional convincing we have gathered together a few helpful statistics.
- According to Bain and Co., a 5 percent increase in customer retention can increase a company’s profitability by 75 percent.
- Gartner Group statistics show us that 80 percent of your company’s future revenue will come from just 20 percent of your existing customers.
- Lee Resource Inc. joins the customer retention and customer response fray by finding that, on average, attracting new customers will cost your company five times more than keeping an existing customer.
In short, responding to emails is a great way to improve customer retention ratings and thus bolster revenues. Don’t believe us? Let’s look at the 2007 cautionary tale of the 44 percent of major UK who ignored customer emails to the detriment of their revenue streams. Failing to respond to customer emails in a timely fashion will result in lost revenue. This is not a speculation, it is pure and simple truth.
If you want to succeed in today’s competitive environment, then you must not ignore your customers. However, the conundrum remains that if you are bogged down by emails, how on earth are you supposed to keep from ignoring your customers? Once again a simple solution is readily available: email automation. In a world where customer retention is key, email automation is better than a delayed email response or worse ignoring your customer completely. Email automation services can allow you to easily share news, follow-up, or send friendly (often times slightly personalized) reminders to your customers. So, do yourself a favor and remember to take a moment to show your customers that you are not in fact ignoring them and that you do value their business. Your customers will thank you and so too will your revenue stream.
