As Benjamin Franklin once said, “Time is money.”
What he failed to add was that the more time your staff takes to reply to an email inquiry, the more money you lose.
Response time is a huge factor in sales decision-making, productivity, and internal and external communication strategy. Whether it is your client-facing teams, sales managers, or someone handling your customer services, even a few hours of delays in response could make a huge difference in results.
In sales prospect, engaging a lead within 5 minutes vs. in 30 minutes increases the chances of converting that lead by 21 times.
Here are some more stats to prove the importance of email and its response time for your business revenue.
Do you know that??
It’s shocking then that over 62% of companies fail to respond to email at all!
In this blog, we are discussing three pressing reasons why, as a business, you should care about your team’s email reply time and how it helps you achieve more success.
Yes, we all have been ghosted on a call by a service provider who asked us to hold for 30 minutes and never came on the call. In contrast, we all love that friend who is just a message away from all our problems and respond to our calls immediately.
The same goes for your business. Getting a response on time is one of the key reasons why somebody would want to do business with you. It is a foremost principle of business ethics, and people take it more seriously than they admit.
With information and reviews available at our fingertips these days, consumers are now impatient than ever. When they have a concern or query, they want to have a resolution quickly before they turn into an angry customer bashing your hard-earned company on social media.
To avoid these situations, you have to keep a close tab on measuring email response time.
When your team is responsive to your customers’ emails and tickets and communicates effectively within the organization, it places them as a trustworthy ‘brand’ everywhere. A brand that is responsive, reliable, and efficient.
As highlighted above, a quick email response buys you time, especially from Millennials.
Why them?
Millennials—today’s 20-and 30-somethings—are even more impatient because they are used to instant gratification. They go to Facebook chat and WhatsApp business to talk to someone immediately.
When they resort to an email, they need a quick response. Dan Schawbel, the founder of Millennial Branding, told MarketWatch. “If you don’t hear from someone in an hour, you immediately feel like they are ignoring you because you’re used to instant gratification.”
Millennials aside, by responding quickly with just an acknowledgment statement, you are buying time to look into the matter without frustrating the other party. So, Instead of someone waiting for the actual resolution, they will feel acknowledged and cut you some slack that whatever they are requesting will get done.
Email is nearly 40x more effective than social media for new customer acquisition, and an average person spends four hours a week engaging with emails.
As a business, how do you track if you are giving your best shot at it?
You dig deep into the data!
Date points like the response time of email, the completion rate, your customer engagement rate, and email volume helps you effectively optimize your strategy and also allows you to take a deep dive into the metrics for specific key customers.
Whether it’s just an acknowledgment email or a follow-up of a significant potential deal, the email response time dictates a lot of things for your strategy. According to a survey, sending more follow-up emails can triple your reply rate.
The key is to understand the pattern of what works and what doesn’t with email response time analytics. For example, analyzing who is the top sales performer and what is his email response time vs. who is the lowest performer and what went wrong. Insights like these are beneficial if you want to measure your KPIs as well.
A quick response to emails coming either from inside or outside the organization is an integral part of keeping your customers and staff satisfied. To begin with, start tracking your team’s email response time to ensure that none of the customers and staff are left unattended.
If your team waits too long (read: procrastinate) to respond to emails, they don’t only risk upsetting customers and staff but also making you lose potential revenues for your company.
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