It’s every marketer’s nightmare: Email goes out about a special weekend event at your store, and a blizzard hits town Friday. Or your ISP suffers an outage and your website’s offline for much of the sale period. Or the email you blasted contained erroneous information about a product feature or price. Soon you’re getting calls and emails pointing out the problem.
What can you do?
A recent article at B2Bonline.com does a great job of running you through the key elements for transforming the big “oops” into a positive customer experience.
One of the best problem-solving tools you have in this regard is email. While customers who turn up at your store can be helped by sales staff (with a freebie or rain check), sending email to your list is the best bet when you can’t identify the prospective customers affected by the snafu. This includes people who tried unsuccessfully to access your website, or those who visited the site but discovered the featured product was not as described.
A follow-up email not only addresses the concerns of these unhappy customers—it indicates to everyone else who opens your message that your company is one that cares about getting it right. Make the most of your follow-up email with these three steps:
- Contact your mailing list as quickly as possible.
- Acknowledge that a problem occurred and apologize (without going into the details of how or why it happened).
- Focus your email on what you are doing to make things right for the customer. You might want to provide a special offer such as extended sale dates, a one-time site-wide discount, or free shipping for a limited time.
Marigold has years of experience assisting clients who need to act quickly in situations such as these. We pride ourselves on rapid turnaround for these urgent projects, and provide our clients with a substantial discount on this type of follow-up mailing to the same list. Please contact us to find out more.