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You spend hours crafting the perfect email and you hit send. What if none of your subscribers open it? This is a major source of concern for all email marketers. However, by implementing these design tips to increase email open rates, you can avoid this issue altogether.

7 Essential Elements of a Great Email Design

• An Attention-Grabbing Subject Line
• Visualizations
• Alt Text
• A Well-Ordered Layout
• Mobile Responsiveness
• Optimized Footer
• Dynamic Content That Is Personalized

 

1. An Attention-Grabbing Subject Line

The subject line is the most critical component of any email you send. That is because it is one of the factors that will determine whether or not someone opens your email, much less clicks on it to read what you have to say. When creating an email, begin by compiling a list of catchy subject lines so that you have a variety of options to choose from if space becomes an issue.

2. Alt Text

Have you ever wondered what your email’s images are actually saying? If you want to ensure that your intended audience sees what you’re saying, include alt text for any images. This will result in a 6% increase in click-through rates (CTR).

3. Visualizations

This may seem counterintuitive, but all those words crammed together on a page are not nearly as important as you believe. That is because the majority of people will scan your email in the same way they would a website. Rather than focusing exclusively on the words you use, consider how the layout of your email will affect how it is read – thereby increasing its engagement and excitement.

4. A Well-Ordered Layout

Email campaigns are similar to content marketing campaigns in that, without a clear and consistent theme, things can quickly become chaotic. That is why you should always organize your layout into digestible sections, even if they only contain a single sentence.

5. Mobile Responsiveness

We live in a mobile-first world, which means that the way your emails are constructed should reflect this. That is why it is critical that your emails appear just as attractive on mobile devices as they do on desktop computers. And the most effective way to accomplish this is through the use of responsive design techniques.

6. Optimized Footer

A footer is actually the last place you want to include critical information; after all, most people will skim it rather than fully absorb it. That is why you should always prioritize your emails by placing the most important call-to-actions (CTAs) first and the least important ones last in the footer.

7. Dynamic Content That Is Personalized

Customers crave recognition. That is why there is a growing trend in email marketing toward personalization through the display of individual customer profiles and purchasing preferences. Numerous marketers actually send emails with these features, albeit without knowing who the recipients are.

Here are some ways automation and personalization boost profits.

1. Increased relevance results in increased sales

With marketing automation, you can not only send targeted emails based on triggers, but also hyper-target them based on rules you set. You can also personalize these messages. And it works. Personalization has increased the effectiveness of marketers by 70-94%, according to Venture Beat.

The more relevant your emails, the more likely you are to increase sales.

2. Automation satisfies customer desires

Email marketing has the highest conversion rate. The average return on investment for email marketing is $38. This kind of ROI is only possible if customers want to hear from you.

Creating diverse content for a large company like BuzzFeed is difficult without automation. You need to know what your subscribers want and give it to them. Imagine how long it would take BuzzFeed to manually send every customer email from all 23 lists instead of using data, personalization, and automation.

In the same way, even if your company hasn’t scaled like BuzzFeed, Sending the wrong emails at the wrong times can reduce engagement and sales.

With marketing automation, you can give subscribers exactly what they want while increasing your success.

3. Personalization instils a sense of importance in the customer

It was mentioned earlier that 73 percent of consumers prefer personalized brands, and 86 percent of consumers say personalization influences their purchasing decisions.

Despite compelling data, 70% of brands fail to personalize. Customers spend more money with brands that personalize email marketing messages.

Ideas for your next automated customer journey

Remember that automated customer journeys aren’t one-shot campaigns. A journey should be taken over a few emails throughout a campaign to help nurture your prospects and encourage them to convert, such as signing up for an online course or purchasing something.

Looking for new automated customer journey ideas? Why not try one of these?

1. Welcome series

Any brand’s email marketing campaign should include an automated personalized welcome email to new subscribers. Why? They help customers learn about your brand.

Remember, these aren’t random emails. This should be followed by information on the brand, how the brand can help subscribers, and possibly a “thanks for subscribing—a here’s special something” as a token of gratitude.

2. Birthday series

There are several ways to automate a birthday series for an automated personalized email. Is your client celebrating? Send them a message, then a birthday offer, and finally a reminder later in the week or month.

3. Anniversary series

Anniversary series are a great way to show your subscribers you care. When did they join? What have they done? These are all small details that show you care about your brand.

Since the 1970s, email has been available, and it has remained quite successful, even with younger audiences. Email marketing is capable of much more than simply delivering messages to recipients’ inboxes.

Indeed, email generates $42 for every $1 invested, a staggering 4,200 percent return on investment, making it one of the most effective marketing solutions available.

What conclusions can be drawn from statistics on email marketing? When it comes to demonstrating email marketing’s legitimacy, the numbers speak for themselves.

1. Marketers who use segmented campaigns increase revenue by 760 percent – Campaign Monitor
2. According to Litmus, four out of five marketers would prefer to abandon social media in favor of email marketing.
3. 68% of Millennials report that promotional emails influenced their purchasing decisions – Fluent
4. 64% of small businesses use email marketing to communicate with their customers – Campaign Monitor
5. 78 percent of marketers reported an increase in email interaction over the previous year – Not Another State of Marketing
6. 56% of people check emails are on iPhones or in Gmail – Litmus
7. Across all industries, the average email opening rate is 19.8 percent, the click-through rate is 11.3 percent, and the bounce rate is 9.4 percent. Perpetual Communication
8. The average open rate of a welcome email is 82 percent – GetResponse
9. When abandonment emails are sent within an hour of leaving a website, cart of goods conversions increase by 6.33 percent – SaleCycle
10. Email engagement is the most important metric for measuring content performance, according to 90% of content marketers – Content Marketing Institute
11. Implementing a mobile-responsive email design can result in a 15% increase in unique mobile clicks – MailChimp
12. Mobile-friendly email is the second most frequently strategy for increasing email engagement – HubSpot
13. If you limit yourself to five emails per week, your audience will reward you with significantly higher open and click rates – GetResponse
14. 99 percent of email users check their inbox daily, with some checking as frequently as 20 times. OptinMonster reports that of those who check, 58% read their email first thing in the morning.
15. According to Statista, 45 percent of internet users avoid opening emails from unknown senders.

Selling products online isn’t the only goal of an e-commerce store. To grow your business, you need to attract more potential customers.

A stagnant website and social media won’t suffice. To attract new customers, you need to create useful content.

Regardless of industry, content is king nowadays. Content helps build brand identity and credibility, especially with search engines.

You can’t always do content marketing alone. You can outsource content for your e-commerce store and gain more benefits.

• Creating ecommerce website content
• Outsource Content for Your Online Business
• Set a publishing schedule
• Better content planning
• Better team scaling
• New ideas and perspectives
• Focus on sales and product improvement
• Outsourcing ecommerce to your advantage

Creating ecommerce website content

If you aren’t using content, you aren’t growing your business.

Content marketing is a powerful way to attract new customers today. By creating content, you provide high-quality, useful, and relevant information to your audience.

It’s true in e-commerce, too. So you get free traffic without paying for paid ads or traffic boosts. Initially, you may be producing articles, guides, and social media posts on your own. But sometimes you need help curating better content.

Content marketing requires research and planning to attract your target audiences and establish your authority. Even if you’re good at it, you can’t always do it alone.

Outsourcing content can help here.

Outsource Content for Your Online Business

According to a 2020 study by the Content Marketing Institute, 84% of B2B companies outsource content marketing. Around 55% of B2C companies do so.

As businesses realize the value of outsourcing, they can leverage content marketing services to their advantage.

Set a publishing schedule

Making and posting quality content may be difficult. As an entrepreneur, you tend to prioritize other tasks over your content and website. This can harm your site’s ranking and make it difficult to attract visitors.

Prevent this by outsourcing your content. Hiring freelance writers and content moderators can help you publish more often. You can even set up a publishing schedule.

Better content planning

Creating high-quality content that engages readers is not easy. It takes time to research target keywords, outline possible articles, and analyze your competitors’ rankings.

Unplanned content releases can confuse your audience about your brand identity. Worse, Google may penalize you for producing shallow content.

Outsourcing content helps your team plan content strategy. Hiring a remote content marketer to work with your writers can help you discover what keywords work best for you.

Better team scaling

A full-time in-house writer earns an average of $55,509.00 per year in the US, according to Glassdoor. They need extra office space, laptops, and SEO tools, in addition to salaries.

Duplicating or reducing them is impractical, especially since they expect to stay with your company for a long time.

Outsourcing content allows you to scale your team as needed. You can easily set your budget based on their workload. Outsourcing content can even boost your ROI.

New ideas and perspectives

It’s good to hear your team’s thoughts on a topic or product you’re writing about. But, as time passes, your audience may grow tired of reading the same ideas and articles.

Outsourcing content creation can help you get better ideas and perspectives. A lot of people enjoy learning from your articles and videos. So you can sell your items to a larger market in the future.

Focus on sales and product improvement

Finally, it pays to delegate non-core business functions. You may have previously worried about juggling orders, shipments, unpaid invoices, and maintaining your website and blog.

Outsourcing content saves time and energy. You won’t have to worry about your schedule or content quality. So you can focus on improving your products and services.

Outsourcing ecommerce to your advantage

Aside from content, most e-commerce tasks can be outsourced. For starters, e-commerce giants like Amazon established Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), so you won’t have to worry about delivery.

The same goes for accounting and web design. By hiring small teams to handle these tasks, you can ensure that your cash flow and website are well-maintained.

Nothing can be delegated to remote teams offshore anymore. This is why you should not hesitate to outsource your e-commerce functions.

Having trouble increasing your open and click-through rates?

If yes, you may have a dirty email list.

Email verification programs examine your list and eliminate invalid or harmful emails. The ultimate effect is improved deliverability and reputation protection for your email server.

Here are some email verification tools to help you weed out spammers.

• Mailfloss
• ZeroBounce
• EmailListVerify
• MailerCheck

1. Mailfloss

Mailfloss is a simple email verification application that interfaces with many email marketing services and provides mass email list verification.

It automates email verification so you can focus on your business. It supports MailChimp, Drip, ConvertKit, Sendinblue, Mailerlite, and others.

Validate email addresses, check for duplicates and spam traps. It also removes hard bounced emails and checks syntax.

The Blogging Wizard uses Mailfloss because it is simple to use, affordable, and has outstanding support.

Mailfloss cleans up your email list for you if you connect email marketing services. It also customizes the tool’s cleaning process by creating your own whitelist and blacklist.

Mailfloss directly links to many email marketing service providers. Zapier connects more platforms.

Mailfloss Pricing

It offers bulk verifications and monthly memberships. For up to 10,000 email verifications, the subscription costs $17/month, while 125,000 email verifications costs $200/month.

If you pay annually, you get two months free, and all plans include a seven-day free trial.

Credits can be purchased if you don’t want to pay monthly, have more than 125,000 emails to verify, or utilize an unofficial email marketing service provider.

2. ZeroBounce

Companies like TripAdvisor, AllState, and Comodo use ZeroBounce to verify email addresses. It has many integrations and verification methods.

ZeroBounce scans for spam traps, hard bounces, and addresses that flag emails as spam. It also removes bogus and misspelled mail.

You can also upload your whole email list for processing.

Other functions performed by ZeroBounce are:

• Single email verification — Verify emails one by one.
• Real-time verification API — Use ZeroBounce’s verification API to prevent bogus emails from being added to your list.
• Customer data – ZeroBounce adds customer data to legitimate email addresses. This data includes your subscriber’s name, gender, and location.
• Integrations – ZeroBounce smoothly interacts with various email providers. With Zapier, you can link even more tools.

ZeroBounce Pricing

Credits and subscriptions are available. Pay-as-you-go with credit. Prices start at $16 for 2,000 emails. Pricing for 2,000 email verifications is $15/month, a 6 percent reduction.

ZeroBounce offers a freemium option with a monthly restriction of 100 email verifications. When you buy credits or a membership, you lose access to these free verifications.

For a quick test, enter a single email address in the verification form on the homepage.

3. EmailListVerify

MailChimp, Shopify, and Rackspace all utilize EmailListVerify to verify email addresses. They’ve scanned over 5 billion emails in their time.

EmailListVerify examines your list for incorrect email addresses and removes them. Duplicate, temporary and invalid emails are removed along with dormant or parked accounts.

It also looks for spam traps, syntax mistakes, and high bounce rates.

Compatible with most major email marketing systems. If your platform isn’t listed, you may always upload a CSV, XLS, XLSX, or TXT file.

EmailListVerify Pricing

EmailListVerify offers a pay-per-email option starting at $4 ($0.004/email). The cost per email check lowers with volume.

Monthly memberships are based on daily email verification. These programs save you up to 50%. From $139/month for 5,000 emails per day.

To validate email addresses on a regular basis, you’ll need a solution that works with your email provider. So hunt for a program that integrates directly with your email provider.

4. MailerCheck

Developed by the same firm that created MailerLite, a famous email marketing platform.

MailerLite has some of the industry’s top email delivery rates. They have 1.1 million clients.

Their platform scans for inactive mailboxes, typos, and syntax mistakes.

MailerCheck Pricing

One-time credits start at $10 for 1K email credits. Buying more credits reduces the cost per email verification. A monthly subscription saves you 20%.

 

Snapchat is a rapidly growing social media platform. It now has over 530 million active users who spend 3-7 minutes per session on the app. Snapchat is a great way to reach new audiences.

Not only that, but Snapchat has a younger audience than Twitter or Facebook. Marketers can leverage this platform’s market potential to build a strong brand presence among millennials.

• Make use of the right Snapchat Filters
• Know your Market
• Monitor Engagement
• Demonstrate Your Ability To Experiment With Video Content
• Use Hashtags (#) in Captions
• Stop Being a Perfectionist
• Motivate People to Follow You
• Engagement
• Get Authentic

1. Make use of the right Snapchat Filters

Custom filters on Snapchat are a great way for brands to connect with their audience. To compete in a crowded field, you must ensure that your branding message stands out. That’s why you should always use a filter that represents your brand, making each marketing campaign memorable.

2. Know your Market

As a marketing tool, Snapchat allows brands to create content that resonates with their audience. Successful businesses know as much about their target market as possible to ensure their product or service meets their needs.

Knowing your audience is difficult, especially when dealing with a younger generation. But it’s vital to maximize Snapchat’s social media marketing.

Understanding your Snapchat audience’s wants and needs can help you improve your brand’s image and sales conversion rates. Snapchat’s audience insights tool can also help.

3. Monitor Engagement

In the absence of data, engagement and analytics are essential. Data can tell you what type of content works best for your brand. As a result, they are more likely to remember your story when they need one of your products or services, and to buy from you.

4. Demonstrate Your Ability To Experiment With Video Content

If you have video content, it can help promote your brand by telling the story of your product or service on each platform. Test out different video formats to see which one gets the most views.

Because video marketing is so effective, you can reach a wide range of people without losing your authenticity. Until now, many companies have struggled to find their voice. Using videos on Snapchat will help you deliver your message in new and creative ways while bringing you closer to your followers.

5. Use Hashtags (#) in Captions

Using hashtags on Snapchat is best because it allows your followers to find new stories quickly. While not as effective as other social media tools, hashtags can help you reach beyond your current followers. Hashtags can also help you connect with like-minded businesses, which can be mutually beneficial.

6. Stop Being a Perfectionist

You can use 10-second videos that aren’t as polished as other content on Snapchat. They give your content a fleeting quality, which you exploit by making your videos more image-heavy. Using maps and other visual imagery with text overlays will increase post engagement. Utilize Snapchat for Business.

7. Motivate People to Follow You

Give your audience a reason to follow you on Snapchat by posting educational and entertaining stories. If someone likes your story, they might remember your username to read more of your work.

To be active on Snapchat, you must have an account. You can do this by following accounts that deal with similar products or brands. This will help you gain followers much faster than just posting content and hoping for the best.

8. Engagement

In terms of social media platforms, Snapchat has one of the highest levels of engagement. If you’re trying to run a business, you can’t call yourself successful without a loyal customer base.

Watching videos from your perspective will make your followers feel closer to you. Everyone knows that creating something valuable and unique takes time and effort. With live stories in your Snapchat marketing strategy, you can show people all sides of your business.

9. Get Authentic

Authenticity is one of the most important aspects of social media marketing. Few businesses take advantage of Snapchat’s opportunity to be more personable and less corporate.

Using real people in your videos and stories builds trust with current customers and attracts new customers looking for businesses with similar personalities. Also, try posting behind-the-scenes content that shows employees working hard or even the office having fun together.

Nowadays, almost everyone has one. In 2021, there will be over 4.1 billion email users, and that number will rise to 4.6 billion by 2025. With this trend, every company needs an email marketing database.

Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective digital marketing strategies (ROI). Because millennials prefer email for business.

But how can a business use email marketing to increase sales and customer reach? See more below.

• Benefits of email marketing
• Tips on How To Capture Email Addresses

Benefits of Email Marketing

Businesses can reach new customers and retain existing ones by emailing product and service promotions. Why email marketing is good for business.

1. High Conversions

According to DMA, email marketing has a $42 ROI for every $1 spent. So, if you’re planning a sale or promotion, email marketing can help you reach more customers and increase sales.

Like sending a special offer or discount to a prospective client. Create an automated workflow to send a welcome, birthday, or re-engagement email to your customers. Also, abandoned cart emails will help you sell more products.

2. Build Customer Retention

An email a week is enough to build lasting relationships.

An email can help with lead nurturing, conversion, onboarding, and retention. A personalized email with customized content can easily build a strong relationship with a customer.

3. Branding

Employers can reach qualified prospects via email.

Sending emails to potential customers keeps your brand fresh. Email marketing is also more effective than social media marketing because it is highly targeted.

Unlike other marketing channels, a company can send bulk emails to a large number of recipients at a low cost.

Tips on How To Capture Email Addresses

An email database is required for email marketing to work. And you’ll need a plan to collect those emails.

Although you can buy email addresses mailing lists, it is best to build them organically.

1. Personalized CTA

Basic, multivariate, and smart CTAs are the three types of CTAs. Basic CTAs are universal. Multivariate CTAs are used to compare two CTAs to see which one converts best. Smart CTAs are tailored to each user’s needs and interests.

Smart or personalized calls to action outperform general and multivariate CTAs by 202 percent.

Everyone who visits your website or blog has a specific goal in mind, so tailor your calls to action to their needs.

Providing content that matches your audience’s interests and needs increases conversion rates.

2. Social Media Pages

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn are great places to reach new people and collect emails. Pitch email newsletters on both personal and business social media.

Distribute insightful content on social media with links to your website or landing pages with email signup CTAs.

3. Slide-in or Pop-up

Timing pop-up ads can help you build an email list. The pop-ups should be tailored to each person’s preferences.

After a visitor spends enough time on your page, they may see a related pop-up ad. Exit pop-ups appear when a visitor tries to leave a page. Scroll pop-ups appear as the page scrolls.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Ideal customer profile vs. buyer persona for B2B startups
• Why should you build an ideal customer profile?

Introduction

A hypothetical customer who would greatly benefit from your product while also providing you with immense value.

That you helped the other company increase revenue, reduce expenses, save time, relieve pain points, or ensure that other companies that fit the ICP want to work with you in the future is critical in B2B sales. In addition to money, your ICP can provide you with feedback, testimonials, and referrals.

ICP delves deeper. Consider the industry, employee count, annual revenue, budget, location, and technology used.

ICP is vital to your company’s success. Even if it changes over time, you should have one before beginning any marketing or sales activities.

The better targeted your ICP is, the higher your conversion rate.

Ideal customer profile vs. buyer persona for B2B startups

Buyer personas and ICP aren’t the same. Buyer personas are the decision makers within an ICP.

If you were wondering if they were the same, now you know. Yes, you do need both. Because sales and marketing are so intertwined, it is best to have both.

After defining your ICP, define your buyer persona. It should be a key player in the buying process.

Remember that not all C- or VPs can benefit from what you have to offer; find the right person. Also, companies are usually organized differently, so research is required.

These include job role, title, responsibilities, pain points, etc.

Why should you build an ideal customer profile?

As previously stated, creating an ICP prior to sales and marketing activities simplifies many crucial tasks such as marketing and sales strategy, resource saving, customer retention and lifetime value increase, and referrals.

• Saving resources
• Marketing and sales strategy
• Referrals
• Customer retention and life-time value

1. Saving resources

By narrowing your ICP, you focus your resources on companies that are more likely to convert.

Your ICP also means you know when to say “no,” saving you time and money.

2. Marketing and sales strategy

It’s easier to create messaging when you know your ideal customer. Then you’ll be able to talk to your prospects and address their concerns.

When marketing to them, you’ll know their motivations and what makes them buy your product.

Knowing how to sell to your prospect will help you set more accurate goals and forecasts.

3. Referrals

Because these customers will truly benefit from your product, they will become brand advocates who will not hesitate to recommend it to others.

Their contacts in your target industries may be useful.

4. Customer retention and life-time value

ICP reduces churn rates. Your ICP shows you exactly how to design your onboarding process and how to meet your customers’ needs and expectations.

How to create an ideal customer profile

1. Choose your best customers

The simplest way to create your ICP is to identify and analyze your most satisfied past and current customers.

Select only the best customers. This means you’ll be looking at companies that adore your product and get above-average value from it.

Contact them if you need any information. They will most likely be willing to share if they truly value your product.

2. Interview your best customers

Set up an interview with your most successful customers to learn about their pain points, how your solution solves them, how your product affects their short and long term goals, and their buying process.

If you’re stuck for questions, we’ve got some prepared in the section below.

3. Identify ideal client traits

Now organize what you know and what you learned in the interviews.

Now you must analyze the data and look for themes. What unites your best customers?

They could be similar-sized companies or people who found your product and bought it in the same way.

All of this data helps you create your ideal customer profile and target the most likely to convert prospects.

4. Fill out the framework that works for you.

It’s time to organize your findings.

You can find templates online, create your own or use ours.

The majority are similar, but if your vertical requires additional fields, feel free to add and customize.

Once you finish your ICP, your sales and marketing processes will become much easier. You have a better grasp of your processes.

Remember that you will need to adjust your ICP over time. It won’t last forever.

Studies show that people remember 95% of what they see and only 10% of what they read. Not surprisingly, 78% of video marketers say video has directly increased sales (Wyzowl).

Social media and video marketing services can help your business grow.

1. Produce Short Videos

Bite-sized and snappy video content is definitely the trend in online video marketing. According to a Wyzowl poll, 69% of people prefer to watch a short video to learn about a product or service. Short videos get more views and shares, which keeps them circulating longer.

2. Make use of the right content

With online video marketing services, marketers can send messages rather than sales pitches. Lifestyle content drives Instagram’s success. Instagram videos elevate brand experiences and sell without effort. Take your audience on a visual journey.

3. Consider Custom Video

It takes more than one great video or one or two generic YouTube video marketing services to reach global viewers according to YouTube’s global viewership survey.

To create personalized video experiences, you need to know your audience’s interests and where they are in your sales funnel. A social media marketing agency can help you segment your audiences and target niche audiences and customer segments.

4. Optimise for search

SEO strategies exist to increase your online visibility. Our YouTube video marketing services include optimizing your video title, description, and tags with keywords.

Of course, any top video marketing agency would agree. Increasingly, vertical video formats are preferred for social media video marketing.

5. Build Your Brand

Unsurprisingly, video is a powerful medium capable of reaching a wide audience while also targeting specific products and ROI-targeted conversions, according to a Google report. Video is a brand management tool that drives conversions and growth.

6. Try Shoppable Video

Interactive video is said to be the next big thing in eCommerce. The ability to buy video marketing services for eCommerce is the future.

7. Use Client Testimonials

Promoting social proof is a must. These videos are great for your online reputation and sales. Hiring a video marketing agency or using professional video production services builds credibility and trust in your content.

8. Have Some Fun With It

Fifty-four percent of consumers prefer brand videos over other types of content (HubSpot) – and they value authenticity. A viral video on social media is frequently candid, demonstrating how audiences gravitate toward raw and natural content. Experiment with live streaming and unscripted Instagram videos, and remember to have fun with it!

Viewers value a video’s ability to delve into their interests twice as much as it values its production quality or platform. A social video marketing company can assist you in focusing your video strategy on the content that your potential customers want to see.

Your customer service skills can make or break your business. Good customer service keeps existing customers happy and attracts new ones. Unsatisfied customers, lost business, and a bad reputation can result from poor customer service.

Fortunately, providing excellent customer service isn’t difficult if you follow a few simple rules.

• Provide multiple support options
• Provide high-quality goods and services
• Respond to all feedback promptly
• Apologize quickly
• Go the extra mile
• Check for feedback
• Be kind and courteous
• Keep your word
• Never argue with a customer

1. Provide multiple support options

Do not add to a person’s frustration by making them search for a way to contact you or get an answer. Include a phone number and email in the footer of your website, and consider adding a FAQ page, a chatbot, live chat, or an online help center.

2. Provide high-quality goods and services

If you sell inferior goods or services, your customer service department will be overworked. Making people like a bad product is difficult, and if you can’t stand behind your brand’s quality, customer service can only do so much. Rather than relying too heavily on customer service, ensure your products and services meet their expectations.

3. Respond to all feedback promptly

According to a recent SurveyMonkey study, 73% of US consumers value quick response times. Respond quickly to customers’ questions, comments, or complaints.

4. Apologize quickly

Make no excuses or be defensive when your company has failed. A sincere, unqualified apology will help a lot. To avoid legal repercussions, you can always apologize for your customer’s bad experience, inconvenience, or frustration.

5. Go the extra mile

Doing the bare minimum in customer service is all too common. Make yourself stand out by going above and beyond the initial reason for contact. Is there anything you can do to help the customer in the future? Is there anything you can do to make them feel better? Be proactive in nurturing customer loyalty—your customers will remember.

6. Check for feedback

Your support line used to be the only way to reach your customer support team. Also available are dozens of third-party online review sites. A bad review can quickly go viral, so keep an eye out for negative feedback. Set up Google Alerts to notify you when your brand is mentioned online, and monitor your social media accounts for mentions.

7. Be kind and courteous

If someone contacts your company for assistance, they are giving you the chance to resolve the issue rather than simply slandering your brand and never using your products or services. Extend them the courtesy they deserve by thanking them for alerting you to the issue and treating it with respect.

8. Keep your word

Never make a promise you can’t keep just to please a customer. If you promise to act on their behalf, do so promptly and confirm your actions with them.

9. Never argue with a customer

Some frustrated customers become argumentative or combative. Rather than arguing back, speak calmly, be polite, and try to steer the conversation toward possible solutions. Forget who is right, focus on how to solve the problem.