What every small to medium size business owner should know about fast email response times.

With competition rife and small businesses juggling for pole position in their industry, it’s not enough just to have fantastic products or offer great services, you also need to throw everything into making sure that customer satisfaction is high on your agenda.

So where do fast email response times come into the picture?

• Positive customer engagement:

When a customer receives a prompt response to an email enquiry, whether by direct email or web form, they will already have positively engaged with your company.

Even if all they need is information for a future date, when they’re ready, they’ll no doubt remember the service received and return to purchase.

• Customer service points:

Whether you respond to a customer via email or phone, they will feel that you value their time so much that you won’t waste it by giving them the run-around, or taking your time to respond to an email.

This is one of the surest ways to turn leads into sales, and it’s so simple.  All it takes is having control over the flow of emails coming into your sales team, and being able to follow up on how long it took for individual sales agents to respond.

• Beating the shelf-life of a lead:

The shelf-life of a lead is far shorter than most realise.  If your sales agents are taking too long to respond to an email enquiry, the short life of the lead, between 5 minutes to half an hour, becomes a missed opportunity.

This is how important quick responses to emails really are.  A jacked-up competitor is going to beat you to the deal if you don’t get your foot in the door first.

• What slow email responses say to your customer:

There are going to be times, especially in a small business, that you’ll be swamped and not able to respond to all emails.  There simply aren’t enough hours in the day in a hectic tech era of business.

Having an automatic response set-up to let customers know that an email has been received and will be attended to within a given period of time is sometimes a necessary evil, however, leaving it there and forgetting to follow up simply tells the customer they aren’t a priority to you.

The sooner you can follow up an automatic response with a personal email or call, the better.  It shows the client that you’re reliable and can be trusted to provide the same follow-through once they’ve purchased a product or service from your company.

• Research stats on quick email response times:

Statistics on quick email response times abound on the web, but here are a few highlights of research done by some of the top schools of thought in business;

An awesome 78% of sales go to the first company to respond. Responding to an email within 5 minutes leads to an increase of 900% in contact rates with clients, which is definitely going to make a difference to the bottom line of any company passionate about quick email response times.

Keep a tight rein on email response times with timetoreply:

Timetoreply makes monitoring email response times child’s play, so if you want to move your business up another rung to success, find out more about what this very clever software can do to give you a hand-up.

You won’t be trapped into contracts or commitments by the timetoreply team, and you’ll have a powerful tool at your fingertips that’ll change the face of your business, hassle-free.