Holiday Service Levels & Email Marketing (Part 2)

In our two-part series that Erin our Director of Marketing wrote, she focuses on how to handle unhappy customers as well as calculating how much business you can handle. It's a good read.

NO ONE IS 100% PERFECT, SO ACKNOWLEDGE IT

When things start to get busy this holiday season avoid ignoring complaints until after the season is over. News travels fast…bad news travels faster and further with people posting their issues all over the web! If you make the time to address service issues as they occur, you could save a customer and they are more likely to tell a friend how you turned the situation around for them and became a hero.

BE READY FOR TOO MUCH BUSINESS

If your business promises 24 hour turnaround times on orders or you ship within 2 business days, calculate your likely response rates for your offers in your email before you send your campaign. Then assess how many orders your team can ship in a single day. Remember 80% of responses come in the first 24 hours of your email being sent, so it's important that you create a strategy for sending emails to handle peaks in order volume. 

If you don't think you can meet service commitments don’t email your whole list at once. VerticalResponse's List Segmentation tool makes it easy to segment your list. Consider segmenting by region and starting promotions from the furthest locations and working your way to local offers for time-saving on shipping. Email offers to buy early in the season such as "buy before X date and receive a free gift with purchase". You can also slice your list into random segments and send a portion of your list everyday to maintain a steady flow of orders throughout the season.

If you've got more thoughts on handling the holiday rush, please comment.

Comments

[stephanie eyre]

The tips and pointers you have are very much appreciated. Another website that offers amazing tipa on customer service is Mindshare/. I highly reccomend thos eof you who are interested on how to improve your customer service to check it out, it;s awesome!

[Erin Jacobs]

Sara-

When the data is available the possibilities are endless for segmenting your list. But let's consider some basics to get you started...consider purchase history and separate out list members with actual purchase history vs. those prospects that haven't yet purchased. How about a gender segment? A great segment to use year round is birthdays, a local cafe sends me a birthday and anniversary offer every year for free dessert. I hope that gets you thinking about segments. We are hosting a web seminar on List Building & Segmentation Strategies on Dec.6th. Check back for more details or look for an invite in the next newsletter.

[sara brady]

Thanks for the great advice in this column! You mention market segmentation by geographical area; what do you think (assuming we have this info available) about segmenting by other factors as well? What would you suggest?