Customer Service Articles

Article / Updated 03-28-2024

Everything is digital these days, and the digital experience (DX) should be more effective and downright delightful than ever before. Its evolution is critical for the future of delivering exceptional customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX) strategies. This digital-first approach to CX is particularly important as new technologies emerge. One such technology is artificial intelligence (AI) — you may have heard of it. AI can be used to create world-class experiences that drive customer loyalty, employee satisfaction and engagement, and a reduction in operating costs. In this article, you discover the essential pieces of a digital-first CX strategy and the steps you need to take to implement your own. Implementing a digital-first strategy The future of CX is moving away from voice channels and toward digital channels. Voice channels are still in use, of course, but your DX strategy must seamlessly integrate digital channels to remain competitive. In fact, to deliver a stellar DX program, keep in mind these four considerations: Self-service should be an integral part of your DX activities. To supercharge agent productivity and self-service experiences, use the power of knowledge. Customers should be at the heart of your DX program. Deploy proactive engagement. For more information on these pillars, visit www.aberdeen.com/blog-posts/the-four-pillars-of-best-in-class-digital-experience-program. While keeping these key components in mind, follow the pointers in this section to start your digital-first strategy. Avoid focusing solely on CCaaS Today’s recipe to develop a crystal-clear focus on the customer is complex. You need several ingredients, and while choosing the right contact center as a solution (CCaaS) product is an important step for your customers’ digital-first experiences, it’s not everything. Would you make a cake with just flour? To ensure your DX strategy puts you ahead of the competition and delivers the delicious results you’re craving, mix together five ingredients to make up that “special sauce.” Manage digital assets In many companies, DX can include several teams and types of interactions, including social media, AI technologies, chat, and email. Eliminating silos means you can access a complete view of your customer history, interactions, and sentiment to provide the high-caliber service your customers deserve, no matter how they interact with your business. Conversational AI and chatbots Customers want self-service, but they also want to feel like they’re having conversations and communicating effectively in these self-service interactions. With AI-powered intelligent virtual agents and chatbots, your customers can have their cake and eat it, too! They can converse naturally and radically improve their automated experiences. If you’re interested in accelerating your self-service channels, visit www.nice.com/products/conversational-ai-and-chatbots to find out more. Promote a unified agent experience Your agents need unified sources of organizational knowledge, product and feature updates, and customer data to easily stay up to date. Without this unified experience, they may experience constant slowdowns to complete trainings or take too long to search for the latest information. This experience empowers your workforce and creates time needed for complex tasks, and it increases confidence, accuracy, and efficiency — all adding up to greater job enjoyment. Provide the omnichannel journey Your customers’ typical journeys are non-linear, so you need to support them through self-service, the contact center, and any combination of channels through to resolution. Varying customer preferences underscores the need for omnichannel support. That includes seamless integration of emerging channels as they become available. Optimize AI for self-service Self-service capabilities powered by AI optimize digital channels by beginning with simple and repetitive use cases that generate high value. You can also use intelligent routing to enable collaboration between live agents and self-service tools. Partner with AI AI has been a supporting role for CX for a while now, but AI in customer interactions is now taking center stage as the main character. AI has the potential to revolutionize every facet of CX across digital industries, so partnering with AI now is crucial. Through this enhanced technology, you can provide a more personalized experience and immerse your customers in AI for unparalleled convenience and satisfaction. AI also upskills your employees and allows them to perform more advanced tasks and increase their impact and value to your organization. When agents trust the system that evaluates their performance, job satisfaction and engagement increase. To advance your company’s future, use AI to maximize employment loyalty and engagement while delivering amazing experiences for their customers. Make experiences flow Your organization — no matter the size or location — can create extraordinary customer experiences while meeting your business goals. If you need help along the way, look to NICE CXone, a cloud-native, customer-experience platform. NICE is a leader in AI-powered self-service and agent-assisted CX software for the contact center — and beyond. Elevate every customer interaction. Find out more at get.nice.com/digital-self-service.html.

Article / Updated 07-18-2022

Customer experience is a dynamic discipline. It's always evolving, so you have to make an effort to stay on top of things! Here, you find several suggestions for additional customer experience resources. You'll notice that a great many of them are blogs. Fortunately, the community of bloggers who focus on customer experience is extremely open and sharing! Reading these blogs on a regular basis enables you to stay abreast of the latest thinking in the customer experience field. Even better, why not participate? By providing comments and questions, you can become a part of the evolution of customer experience. You're likely to receive unbiased and helpful feedback that can help you move the needle on your customer experience efforts! LinkedIn LinkedIn hosts scads of groups devoted to customer experience. If you're looking to find out more about customer experience or network with other experts in the field, this is a great place to start! Here are just a few groups to choose from: Advanced Customer Experience Strategy (ACES): This group is designed for seasoned customer experience experts who want to engage in a stimulating, rigorous study of customer experience strategy. Building the Customer-Centric Organization: This group focuses on the migration to customer centricity by focusing on customer experience management, customer-centric process design, and organizational design. Business-to-Business Customer Experience Management: A wide-ranging forum that looks at customer experience from a B2B perspective. This forum discusses everything from buying decisions to cross-process coordination and alignment. Chief Customer Officer Group: This group focuses on advocacy for the chief customer officer function while including broad discussion on customer experience topics. Customer Experience Leaders: Look here for advice and counsel from practitioners in the field. There's nothing like hearing from the people who are executing customer experience on a daily basis. Customer Experience Professionals: This group offers lots of case studies and varying points of view from a large group of customer experience experts. CXPA: This is a group run by the Customer Experience Professionals Association, which is a global nonprofit focused on the advancement of customer experience management practices. In addition to its LinkedIn group, the organization runs CX certification classes. Customer Experience Summits and Conferences A number of excellent customer experience summits and conferences are held worldwide. These conferences typically come in a couple variations. One variation features presentations from field experts, vendors, suppliers, consultants, and other interested parties. Often, at these conferences, there's a heavy emphasis on selling you different products and services. The other variation is also likely to have vendors and sponsors, but the agenda typically involves dozens of presentations from people (like you) who are in the process of trying to improve customer experience in their organizations. At these conferences, you see lots of "this is how we're doing it" discussions. Although the quality of the presentations can vary, if you're in the process of implementing a customer experience program, talking to people who are making it happen can be extremely helpful. One of the best things about these conferences is the networking opportunities. You can use these conferences to find and develop your own network of customer experience experts, peers, and friends who may just lend a supportive ear or idea sometime down the line. Although the names of specific conferences can and do change, the following conferences and sponsors provide valuable learning sessions and productive networking opportunities: The Conference Board: The Customer Experience Conference Forrester's Forum for Customer Experience Professionals Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit Gartner Customer 360 Summit InMoment (formerly Mindshare) InMoment is a favorite customer research, customer survey, and customer experience analytics organization. The InMoment blog talks about the data analytics side of worldwide customer experience. Customer Experience Matters Bruce Temkin and his team are "market makers." Their research, perspective, and insights are discussed by customer experience experts worldwide. Their Customer Experience Matters blog contains everything from recent research to deep insight on customer experience execution. CX Journey Annette Franz's CX Journey blog is a broad sweep of the customer experience landscape. Look to Annette's blog for insight and resources on execution of both customer experience and employee experience. Beyond Philosophy Colin Shaw, who has written extensively on customer experience, is one of the thought leaders on that topic. His thinking and his words have not only made him a LinkedIn Influencer, but a source of inspiration for elevating the discipline of customer experience. His blog, found at www.beyondphilosophy.com/blog, is required reading. Roy's Blue Blog Roy's Blue Blog and the next one are maintained by the authors of Customer Experience for Dummies (published by Wiley) — Roy Barnes and Bob Kelleher, respectively. Barnes' blog, Roy's Blue Blog, goes into detail about executing customer experience and includes observations from the day-to-day world of customer experience. Want to talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly of customer experience? This is the place. The Employee Engagement Group Blog The Employee Engagement Group blog is the online home of Bob Kelleher. The blog's focus is on employee engagement, but you'll quickly discover the degree to which an engaged workforce can improve customer experience! The two go hand in hand.

Cheat Sheet / Updated 04-12-2022

To compete in a world where more and more products and services are commoditized more quickly than ever before, you have to up your game and deliver great customer experiences at every point of interaction in your business. A consistently great customer experience is very difficult to copy and may represent a sustainable competitive differentiator for your company!

Article / Updated 09-20-2017

Tickets can help you gather information for your CRM. Ticketing uses forms to track an “issue” that is created by filling out the form. This “issue” could be interest in your product, or it could be someone having a problem with a product you sell. In either case, you want a person from your company to engage with the person filling out the form and manually close it. The image below shows a form for customer service that can help you with capturing new leads. Using ticketing forms for capturing leads Ticketing forms are by their nature single opt-in, meaning no confirmation email is required. When used in the context of sales, they ensure your sales/customer service team always engages with leads. Tickets opened this way must be manually closed, which means you can see at any given time how many tickets are open and who they are assigned to. It’s an effective way to enforce lead follow-up, ensuring no leads fall through the cracks. Ticketing forms encourage better lead nurturing and follow-up. Good ticketing systems also include average response times in their reporting, which helps to ensure fast follow-up when leads and clients reach out to your organization. In addition to having someone manually close each ticket that is opened, be sure to schedule workflows and/or marketing automation when people fill out your lead capture forms. Ticketing forms create a more consistent user experience and strengthen your brand, while providing a convenient way to provide educational content to the people who fill out your forms. Using ticketing forms for customer service Just as you want a human in the loop to confirm a new lead, you also want a human to confirm that when a lead has a problem, it was resolved, and how it was resolved. Ticketing forms gives you this ability and are an effective tool for ensuring the best customer experience possible. By encouraging your customers to use ticketing forms, you ensure that no issues get ignored. You can measure time to respond to the ticket, as well as ask for feedback after the issue was resolved to measure quality of service. Customers feel valued and their voices are heard, which improves your brand overall satisfaction with your company. Below, you see a summary of a ticket. Your CRM should be able to easily call up tickets to see status and if they were resolved, how they were resolved. Exit ratings for tickets help you get an idea if the customer is happy now. Integrating workflows and satisfaction surveys In both types of applications for ticketing forms, build in automation. For example, a workflow that schedules a CRM activity, sends an email, sends a survey, or any combination. Automated follow-up messages to your leads and clients are opportunities to cross-sell, up-sell, and/or educate, but be careful to not overdo the selling part. People who fill out forms, particularly for support, don’t want to be inundated with “buy this” messages.

Article / Updated 09-20-2017

The forms you place on your website are absolutely critical for gathering contacts into your CRM and starting them down the path of becoming clients. Forms generally fall into two categories: confirmed opt-in and single opt-in. Using confirmed and single opt-in forms to gather info for CRM Confirmed opt-in (also known as double opt-in) forms are most frequently used for newsletters, e-book downloads, and other marketing-related content. After someone gives you an email address, your CRM should automatically send him an email with a link to click — thus confirming the contact is valid. Confirmed opt-ins are the best way to ensure your new contacts are valid, and people who have gone through the confirmation process are 70 percent more likely to engage with you. Efficient engagement drives long-term growth and focuses your team’s time on people who are truly interested in working with you. Because confirmed opt-ins require the person to take action (clicking a link in the confirmation email), some people won’t finish the confirmation process. In this case, ticketing forms are a good solution for when you want to ensure someone on your team follows up with every lead. Single opt-in forms don’t require a confirmation email to be sent to the person filling out the form. With single opt-in forms, there is risk that a competitor or person with ill intent could sign up a fake lead or worse, a spamtrap email, that could affect your ability to send email to the inbox. Choose the type of form you put on your website wisely. Some email marketing and CRM service providers give you the option to send a second confirmation email, which gives you a marked increase in confirmation rates. While the primary objective of each confirmation email is to get the recipient to confirm, these emails can also include more information about your products and services below that call to action in the message. After someone confirms intent, you can further engage with him using a lead nurturing process. Part of that lead nurturing can be sending each new lead a sequence of emails, spaced out over days or weeks. Series of emails triggered by forms are often called auto-responders, and allow you to send information to your new leads in slower, more digestible chunks. You have many options, including setting CRM activities, sending text messages, and creating opportunities. Be creative and think about how you want to guide new leads from your forms to become customers. Gathering the minimum amount of data for your CRM Forms work best when you make them as easy as possible to fill out. You have a balance to make when designing your forms. Your natural instinct is to request as much information as possible, so you can target your follow-ups precisely. But people are less likely to fill out your form when you ask them for too much information. The more manual typing you require someone to do, the weaker the incentive to fill out the form. Focus on asking for the minimum amount of information on the first form and then work on getting more data later. A good CRM includes a form builder that has automatic data appending, so with only an email address, you can get a lot more information without explicitly asking for it. Optional behavior to enhance user experience If your form responds to the user’s actions, you have a better chance of getting the user to provide additional information. Reactive forms are driven by logic and are sometimes referred to as branching forms. Improve user engagement with your forms by showing follow-up questions inline. For example, ask what general type of product someone is interested in and then have a more detailed product question appear. Progressive profiling is another technology that may be helpful in creating better engagement with your forms. The server checks whether a cookie is on the user’s computer, indicating the person has been to your site before. If that person is recognized, the server pre-fills the form with information stored in the CRM (such as name and email address). This process can save time in data entry and help the user focus on new information you want to collect.

Article / Updated 09-20-2017

Web traffic is important data for CRM. Web analytics can be complicated to dive into, but your marketing team should be able to distill important factors in your marketing that can guide your strategy and policy. Assessing SEO and PPC performance Search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising are two top-of-funnel marketing-related activities that directly influence sales. Each can be tagged with campaign IDs so you can see what kinds of leads they’re driving to you. When you’re looking at SEO, evaluate the strength of keywords on search. Google, and to a lesser extent Bing, send you traffic based on what they perceive your reputation and relevance to be. Work with an SEO expert to come up with the right keywords and content for your pages. To the extent you can see what kind of search words bring traffic to your site, work with your web development and marketing team to make sure you’re targeting the right people and maximizing clicks from those important market segments. SEO is as much about what you put on your website as it is what other websites publish about you. When high quality sites link to you, they tell search engines that you’re relevant and important. Be sure your SEO strategy includes both aspects. PPC gives more control to you as the advertiser. You can bid on different keywords, adjust how much you spend on them, and evaluate the success of those campaigns. Comparing campaigns and their impact You can set up web analytics and assigning campaign IDs to your advertising. Your marketing team should look at the different campaigns you’re running to assess how your campaigns are performing. Invest more money into the better performing campaigns and test new variations on those. Continually adjust and perfect your ads, landing pages, and follow-up strategies. Use A/B testing in conjunction to see what kind of content resonates best with your target market. Tag your campaigns with IDs, so you can see how your website traffic is performing with each campaign. Take a look at the average number of webpage views your visitors generate with each campaign. More page views generally indicate greater interest, which usually results in more revenue, but not always. Be sure you track conversions, which you can trace back to different campaigns. Evaluate cost associated with bringing in a lead to access which campaigns are most effective. This cost per lead (CPL) calculation is good for comparing raw numbers of people entering your sales funnel. With any campaign, your goal is to minimize the cost of generating a new lead while maximizing both the chance of converting that lead and the revenue generated by that lead. Structure your reporting to look at these factors and focus on the best campaigns you’re running. Ask your marketing team to determine why your better-performing campaigns are more successful so you can learn from what works and capitalize on it. When your CRM tracks interactions across multiple channels, you can generate a report like the one below. When one channel or campaign significantly impacts brand interaction, you can see it visually in a report like this.

Article / Updated 09-20-2017

Funnels are useful to measure the progress of leads as they move along your buyer journeys. From stage to stage, you can visualize the effectiveness of your sales process. They provide an excellent reporting overview that your team can monitor regularly. Funnels are useful for sales and marketing alike, as both interact with leads and contribute to the buyer journey at different times and in different ways. Tracking sales progress with conversions in CRM Generally speaking, sales are divided into two types: business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C). B2B sells to companies and generally has lower sales volume thresholds, but higher-dollar products and services. B2C sells to the general public and is volume driven. B2B and B2C both benefit from using funnels to track sales processes. Because B2B sales are more complex and generally take more time, CRM platforms have a special tracking mechanism called an opportunity to store everything about that deal. B2C sales are usually faster and don’t require the level of detail for each individual sale made. Tracking the buyer journey for a B2C sale tends to be more automated. Defining the stages of a conversion Every sale has a process, a buyer journey. Along that journey, you set up specific gates to define stages of the sales process. As leads move from stage to stage, you can measure how long they take and what percentage of leads drop out of the journey. When you set up your funnels, have specific, defined criteria to determine when a lead moves to the next stage. Often with B2B opportunities, these gates are when a lead takes an action, such as agrees to a demo, accepts a proposal, or signs a contract. With B2C, stages in the funnel might be when a lead visits a specific page on your website, downloads a whitepaper, or purchases a product. It’s important that everyone on the sales and marketing teams understands what each stage represents and can easily identify when someone doesn’t advance to the next stage. Oftentimes in modern selling, a lead backtracks in your sales process, deciding to take more time to make a decision, or passing off responsibility for the purchase to someone else. When backtracking happens, your CRM must track this movement. The image below shows an example of how you can define stages in a conversion process. Measuring time and dropout rates for each stage Funnels provide two very useful metrics to help you understand your sales process — time in stage and dropout rates. When you see your funnel, your CRM should display these key statistics for you. You should establish goals and measure long-term averages as benchmarks. If you’re starting and have no context, you can start with industry benchmarks. Watch the final stage of conversion. For example, the software industry standard is generally 10 to 15 percent with many competitors in the crowded market, but one company sets a benchmark of 30 percent. If your numbers show significant deviation from your industry standards or goals, find out why. Every month, your sales and marketing teams should look at your funnels to determine the performance of your overall sales process, as well as how each salesperson is performing. You can learn from these key factors: Campaigns: Are any of your campaigns bringing in higher quality leads? If leads spend less time in the funnel to become clients, or if a greater percentage of leads become clients, you’re seeing better leads and those campaigns should get more investment. Sales benchmarks: Are your salespeople hitting conversion percentage goals and sales quotas (numbers of conversions)? If the bottom of the funnel is more human-intensive, examine how each salesperson is doing. More sales training may be required if you see recurring patterns of low conversion rates by some of your sales team. Marketing benchmarks: Wherever marketing is involved, track overall and specific performance in the funnel. One metric is the total number of leads that hit the top of the funnel, a measure of awareness. The second stage in the funnel measures lead quality. If certain gates between stages filter a large percentage of leads, ascertain whether it’s due to lead quality or your sales process. By filtering funnel reports by campaign ID, you can see how each campaign performs against the others. Activating workflows for stages in CRM Leverage your CRM’s ability to track the progress of your leads. Activate workflows to encourage leads to progress through your sales process and funnel. As you analyze your sales process, examine how and why people advance to the next phase. Bring together your sales and marketing teams to assess whether activating a workflow when a lead hits that gate helps the sales process. Check out how you can set workflows to be activated automatically when an opportunity reaches a given stage. Another option may be to set a fixed percentage for chance to close the opportunity when that opportunity reaches a given stage. Look at your process abandonment strategy. If a lead gets stuck in a stage for too long, activate a workflow as a way to push that lead to advance. For example, you can send a lead a discount code if you feel leads lose interest due to price.

Article / Updated 09-19-2017

Social media and CRM go together perfectly. Social media is a powerful platform for communicating with a large number of people and expanding your reach. One significant challenge for marketers is that the bulk of the data collected about the use of social media is kept in the hands of the social media companies. Good social media measuring tools help extract that data. To make the most of your social media marketing, your primary objective should be to drive people from the social media websites and applications to your website and applications. Social media is a means to start people on your buyer journeys. This connection between social media and your CRM is sometimes called social CRM. Measuring impressions and actions with CRM All social media channels provide some level of analytics. Some social media networks give you more insight into these analytics, allowing you to connect activity on those social networks with your CRM. Whenever you post anything in social media, tag inbound links to your website with campaign IDs. You can then track attribution, a connection between a source campaign and a contact in your CRM. You can see which social media channels contribute to new leads and conversions. When your social data is integrated with your CRM, you can automate actions that your contacts take in social media. After you make a social media connection, a like, share, retweet, or other action can trigger a workflow within your CRM. Scheduling CRM activities from social engagement is particularly useful when your salespeople have a limited number of leads. Rather than relying on your marketing team to call up your salesperson and tell her a lead liked a post, she can be alerted to it automatically and take action. Social media tracking should give you some insight into how well you’re doing overall. Some basic measurements illuminate the strength of your brand on social media. The number of impressions (the number of times someone sees something you post) is a start, but you can learn more with deeper analysis. A few key metrics tell you what you need to know: Conversation is a measurement of interaction between you and your contacts. If people reply to your posts, they’re contributing content to your brand and your messaging. Amplification tracks when people share your content. The more sharing, the greater your reach and the more brand credibility you’re establishing. Applause measures when someone likes or favorites one of your posts. This statistic tells you the level of empathy and agreement you have within your audience. Impact is an overall measurement of engagement with your audience. Interest is a summary of clicks that your audience has done with your content. More interest means more clicks, which often can be traced to an ROI. The image below displays all these metrics together on the same chart. Spend the time to see how your social media posts impact your business. Calculating influence and lead qualification in your CRM Third-party data sources can connect social media data to your CRM. FullContact is one such provider, allowing you to learn more about the contact and his sphere of influence through data appending. Based on a contact’s email address, you can learn a lot of additional information that is useful to people in sales and marketing, such as number of followers on Twitter, topics blogged about, or the contact’s LinkedIn page address. With FullContact (or a similar vendor) data available in your CRM, you have the power of information at your fingertips. The easier it is to discover important information about leads, the more successful your sales team can close them.

Article / Updated 09-19-2017

Your CRM can help you manage your projects. As a project progresses, your project manager reports on how the project is doing. It’s important to watch the right metrics, so your management understands the health of the project without getting bogged down in details. Tracking resource utilization Resource utilization is a measure of how well your labor force is being used. The calculation for this rate is simple: billable hours divided by the total amount of hours you pay your employees. The higher that ratio, the more fully utilized your labor is, and less time employees aren’t getting reimbursed by clients. The image below demonstrates how you can easily see how full someone’s schedule is, and how much time he’s spending in management versus working on billable projects. As a manager, you want to see how much overhead is spent in management and if your people are overloaded or underutilized. If people on your projects allocate less than 60 percent of their time to billable projects, you may have too much labor on hand. It may also indicate too much overhead spent on managing, as opposed to doing. Every company has a target number for resource utilization; if you aren’t meeting that target, review project updates and notes to find out why. If your project manager tracks everything your employees do internally, you can see what is taking people’s time. You can then change priorities and processes. Viewing overdue tasks in CRM Every project management system shows overdue tasks. If these overdue tasks are on the critical path, they directly affect everyone else associated with the project. There may be an ineffective project manager, poor budgeting or forecasting, or changing requirements. The project manager should be able to articulate the reasons for tasks being overdue and take steps to alleviate the problem immediately. Budgeting projects and tasks in CRM Budgeting can be a bit of an art form, particularly when it comes to technology. Oftentimes, people are overly optimistic on how long a task or project should take, and the budget may not allocate enough time for testing and getting a product ready for the client/consumer. To be on the safe side, if you’re starting a new project and you’re not sure how much time it will take, double or triple any estimate. The better you can break down requirements, the easier you can estimate the amount of work required. Each piece adds up, as you design tasks and connect them together.

Article / Updated 09-19-2017

You can measure the effectiveness of your email marketing campaign with CRM. More than just watching individual email campaigns, you need to measure how your email marketing is performing over time. If your messages are getting more or less effective, you want to know and take action. After you understand how your email marketing drives revenue, use your knowledge to predict when your emails create action from your contacts. Because your CRM is tied directly to your email marketing system, you can analyze your database and see which demographics bought more from you. If you know men over the age of 50 performed well in a campaign, look at the design and ascertain why. You can use this knowledge for future campaigns. Watching read and click rates over time using CRM When you look at overall performance, you’re accumulating a lot of data from what your contacts do with the emails you send them. Watching read and click rates over a prolonged period tells you whether you’re hitting the mark on a holistic level. Reads and clicks are the best indicators of interest in your large-scale email communication. When you measure this data, you need to average the daily variations and see how you’re doing as a whole. You need to undergo statistical analysis to understand true long-term performance. To accurately measure long-term email marketing effectiveness, take your daily volume into consideration and do some data smoothing. It prevents small volume days and statistical noise from skewing your results. With good statistical modeling, you can see whether people are taking more interest in your messages and whether you’re getting better at convincing them to engage with your emails. Below is a summary of reads and clicks over a three-month span. Daily reads and clicks have variations, because during low volume days, email sent is triggered by workflows. Automatic email has a lower overall effect on total read and click rates, however, because it does represent much less volume. Comparing performance to benchmarks One common question involves whether a client’s read, click, or bounce rates are “good.” The answer is always “it depends,” much to the frustration of the person asking. Many studies have been published over the years, with differing statistics available based on industry, list size, and email frequency. What I’ve found is that list size is the strongest driver of email interaction. This statistic isn’t much of a surprise, as larger lists are often associated with less personal, less meaningful relationships between the brand and the individual. Your email service provider or CRM vendor should provide you with benchmarks you can use to compare your performance against similar clients. Industry benchmarks are a good indicator of your effectiveness compared to others in your market. Measuring conversions from email campaigns in CRM Conversion tracking requires your CRM to track people all the way from when they received your email to the conversion itself. You can tag links in your email with campaign IDs, which can then track back to your individual campaigns. You may also consider using a CRM that does this segmentation for you automatically.