The Email Strategy We Used to Increase Our Billing Reply Rate by 294%

Posted by Pat Henseler in Warm Email Marketing Insights

When you are dealing with client billing issues, whether that be updating credit card information, declined charges, or outstanding payments, you need to be able to get in touch with your prospects and find a solution – and you want to do that as quickly as possible so you can get paid and your customers don’t lose access to their product or service.

But if your clients aren’t seeing your message or responding to fix the issues, that means you lose out.

In the past when a billing issue came up, we got very little response from the automated emails in our CRM.

We thought we could do better.

And we realized we needed something other than just another client touchpoint, but a completely different way to stand out in the inbox.

That’s when we turned to our own email software tool, Connect 365, but this time with brand new eyes; we used it as a client notification tool…not just as a marketing and sales tool.

In this post we share:

• How we drastically increased the reply rate and open rate from these billing alert emails.
• Why it works.
• And how you can use the same approach for a number of different purposes to help support your business (and your bottom line).

The Secret to a 27.59% Reply Rate and a 59.77% Open Rate

Before we jump to the results, as a point of comparison, our baseline using our standard CRM was a 7% reply rate and a 45% open rate. So, yes, we had some response, but it did very little to help our clients fix their billings issues.

After analyzing our email outreach, we realized that our approach was one of convenience. Like many, we set up an automated system to reach out. But with CRMs, that often leads to a fairly distant, cold message and to make matters worse, our emails were getting lost in our clients’ inboxes.

They were hitting our clients’ promotions or spam folders and weren’t finding their way to the primary inbox solely because of how they were being delivered. We were doing what every other business was doing and no one cared to respond.

That had to change. We turned to Connect 365 because it allowed us to show our human side with a more personal, warm approach. And that’s because the software sends these emails from our own email addresses, not from a 3rd party email client, there is no unsubscribe button, and no odd formatting that screams “mass email.”

The result is an email that looks (and is delivered) to their inbox just like an email would be from an old friend.

Using a tool like Connect 365 we are still able to send these emails in bulk (so we didn’t have to take the time to send them one-by-one), without sacrificing the appearance that we had personally sent them.

And the results blew us away!

Our email open rates increased from 45% to 59.77% ← A 33% increase!

And more importantly, our email reply rates skyrocketed from a mere 7% to 27.59% ← A 294% increase!

More clients opened the emails and more clients responded to them, allowing us to fix pending billing issues and put us on track to receive revenue we would otherwise miss out on. And if you have projected revenues in your financial planning based on expected payments or payment plans from clients, you know how important it is to work quickly and get a response when issues crop up.

How Connect 365 Can Help Your Bottom Line

If you’re trying to get your prospects to read a blog, become a client, get on a sales call or attend to a billing issue as in this case, Connect 365 has proven – across the board – to increase open and reply rates.

And, of course, the more people you can get to read and respond to your emails, the better off your business will be.

That’s the ultimate goal with choosing your marketing channel or marketing tool…Be where you can get the RIGHT eyeballs on your message.

This experiment was just one very specific case study, but the industry average for open rates using  traditional email marketing software like Constant Contact or Infusionsoft or Aweber or Mailchimp is typically in the range of 10-20%. Average reply rates are typically way less.

However, using Connect 365, we typically see open rates of 30-40%+ and because the emails look so personal, it allows us to write in a personal, sincere way, building trust and increasing responses which is ultimately what you want as a marketer or business owner.

The lesson here is simple: Connect 365 leads to more action from your prospects and more action means better results for you.

But, this is just one example of how we use it to connect and build relationships with our prospects and clients. Here are just a few other ways our clients have used Connect 365 to support their businesses and increase response rates:

How you use it is up to you, but here’s a tip – any time you need a personal touch: turn to Connect 365.

Connect 365 gets results for business owners and takes a lot of the tedious work of email marketing off your shoulders. Click below to learn more.

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