Best Practices for Customer Communications

Why Communication Matters

Companies doing business online, especially those selling digital products and services, face many challenges.  One of the most critical is effectively communicating with prospective and current customers.  In a daily life overloaded with blogs, email, text and social network updates, gaining the attention of your customers is increasingly difficult.  In addition, consumers and innovative companies are shifting towards advanced commerce models, such as subscription or consumption models, for their favorite products and services which necessitate new types of communication and new rules for existing ones.

An effective communication strategy must address all stages of the customer lifecycle, from acquisition to retention to end of life to marketing to past customers (re-marketing), and define the types of communication that are relevant at each level.

We have witnessed numerous best practices both from our first-hand experience and from working with our innovative merchants.  Three notable examples are:

• Reinforce the benefits of your service and company in every communication.   Email is often the primary source of contact with your customers and users.  It is important that people actually take the time to read your email, and that is much more likely to happen if they receive value from it.  This value can be as simple as providing tips to increase efficiency, or updates about new content that is of interest to the user.  On this same topic, email should also look the part.  HTML is the standard for email and it should be used to provide clean, attractively branded email.  All of these points apply not only to marketing messages, but to any communication that your company sends.  A billing notification or receipt can easily include a personalized message, upgrade offers, as well as relevant links to the user’s billing history page.
• Recognize the power of clarity and transparency in your communications.  For example, in a payment method required free trial program, you might expect to see maximum conversion of trial users to paying customers if you do not communicate your intention to charge the customer prior to the end of the trial period.  However, if you do not clearly communicate what actions your company will be taking, you should expect a higher rate of chargebacks and an overwhelmed customer service organization. This is the result of a subset of customers who misunderstand the terms of the trial and are not expecting to be billed. In contrast, being clear and upfront in your communications does not take away from your true conversion percentage, and will increase the satisfaction and utilization for trial users.  These thoughts hold true for existing customers as well.  If you make it difficult for an existing customer to leave your product or service, you are less likely to see that customer return later; in addition, chargeback rates from frustrated customers will be higher.
• A clear chain of communication with users makes it is easier to defend any chargebacks that may occur due to friendly fraud.  Any email that you send should have a link to opt out of future notifications and/or instructions on how to cancel an account.  This allows your customers who no longer want your service to leave on good terms and potentially return later on.  But before a customer leaves, having a simple exit questionnaire and a retention plan in place will help improve both your offerings and your bottom line.