Managing Inbound Emails From a Successful Outbound Campaign

Henry Lach 0:30
Well,

good morning, good afternoon. Good evening, everybody, depending on where you are around the world, we were at the, I guess, the penultimate session here, I think there's a closing keynote remark after that after this, and then then we're all done. So first of all, congratulations, everybody, for getting through all of the sessions that we've had the last few days. And now that you're all like superstar experts at all things email marketing related. I'm here to talk a little bit about what happens when, when you are successful, and you get a bunch of emails back in so it's kind of the other half of the equation, it's it's, you know, we've learned how to, you know, Deacon demark, bimi, all of our emails out and, and get the right messaging. And if we do it, all right, we hopefully get a lot of things coming back, back in, right. So let me introduce myself. Let me just get this work in here. My name is Henry Lach, I'm basically an inbound email specialist. I've been running inbound email related companies for a very long time. A few facts about myself, I called just outside of Toronto, my home. Mostly because of COVID. My big sport passion these days is pickleball. So if you haven't tried it, give it a try. If anybody hasn't noticed the flavour of the month is non fungible tokens. Don't know why it just seems to be a thing. And if you want to reach me, there's my email address. So please do so. So as a company, we've been doing inbound email solutions for a very long time, 25 years now, we're a long time. And we've done it for hundreds of companies around the world. So we've got a fair bit of experience in how to manage both the business process side and the tooling associated with with managing inbound emails. So from a marketing goal perspective, what we're trying to do is manufacturer interactions, we want to have start a process on this side and and then have it deliver outcomes on that side. And generally the outcomes we're looking for are buying outcomes. So the thing to keep in mind is that it's a two way street on the email side, right? So yes, you're going to email out and a lot of the things you're going to email out aren't say, hey, you reply back to me, they are going to be you know, go to this website, do this, buy this, do whatever, you know, those types of things, but in a lot of times, you're going to get replies back, that's just a normal course. And not not just, you know, bounces and out of office replies, but legitimate replies back, those are the ones we're talking about here, right? So if you know, if you're doing it, right, you know, and you're sending out 100,000 emails, you'd like to think that maybe I'm gonna get 1000 legitimate responses back to whatever it is that I'm asking them. Because we are kind of going fishing, we're hoping to catch fish and that fish on ultimately is worth a lot to us at the end of the day. So when we do this,

and we do it at scale,

we really need to operate from the team inbox perspective. So what we're not going to do is have all the replies coming back to you know, Johnny or Jane's inbox right? Not you know, we have just too many of them coming back to deal with that. So this is where our team inboxes come into play. And I'm sure all of you have have been using a number of these for quite a while. This obviously is more than just a related to a marketing outbound campaign. This is customer service. This is billing, this is accounting, but it is increasingly offers deals, sales orders and info, those types of things where where it is looking for that response back from our outbound marketing campaigns. And so what I'm specifically talking about is how to best manage the team inbox experience from as a result while your marketing campaigns so what's the problem that we're solving? Well, the problem with the team inbox is it's the too many hands in a cookie jar problem, right? So you know, if you only have one or two people, that is you know, managing the inbound emails that are coming in, you probably make do with a simple solution. As soon as that's 456 and you know, we deal with customers that are managing, you know, 10 2040 100 agents handling, one inbox, right? That chaos method isn't going to work. You're going to need some some tooling to help you manage that process. So let's go through some of the goals associated with that. So mismanagement is the biggest problem, right? So emails come in and volume, and they don't get handled properly. So we want to make sure we eliminate that we want to improve the productivity of the people that are handling those emails so that we get the most so that we can we want to basically maximise customer satisfaction always right, that's the that's, that's key, because we know that the happier customers are, the more that they buy. And then we want to make our CFOs happy by being able to do more with less. So these are sort of the four sort of transitional things that we're going through in managing our inbound email processes. This is not a vertical challenge. This is a horizontal challenge. I've put five down here. But really, the the challenge of managing high volume inbound emails applies to every vertical that's, that's out there. And I mean, we are talking to people at this conference. We've got people from all walks of lives and all different verticals here. So So let's talk about some of the specific success drivers for inbound email management. So number one, is speed of reply. And, yes, of course, we want to reply as quick as we can, but you also can't hire for the peaks alone, then you would have probably, you know, 50% of your staff sitting around doing nothing, three quarters of the time, right. So there's obviously a line that you have to kind of meet here and that that, that need for the speed of reply changes depending on the industry that you're in. So generally speaking, if you know and that's the nice thing about email, by the way, is it isn't real time, right? So you don't have to have somebody there that second replying. Generally speaking, if I you know, if I get a customer sends in an email in the morning, you want to get back to them that day. So if it's within the day, that's generally considered acceptable.

If that pushes to the next day, because you know, you were busy, and certainly the next day, you're probably okay. There's an industry however, that I'm going to point out, which actually requires a significantly faster reply time. And I'm just going to use that to highlight because there's probably many industries like this, where you're going to have to gauge your reply time, based on on the needs of that industry. So transportation, in we have a number of transportation customers. And the way it typically works with a transportation company is whoever needs to send goods from point A to point B. They, they basically have their 10 or 15. You know, brokers are trucking companies that they use, and they just send an email to all of them going, this is what I need to do, you know, move this truckload from here to there, this train motor, whatever it is. And so basically the only the only suppliers of that are the transportation companies that have a chance at that are the ones that reply within 15 minutes, that's we could keep getting told by all of our transportation customers that they have about 15 minutes to reply to those to those requests, those quotation requests, or they won't be considered for, for the business. So that's, that's pretty quick. That's the quickest we've we've seen actually, Jen, generally speaking, you've got hours, but but not days. Okay, number two, the accuracy of the reply. And you might think that wouldn't be an issue. And unfortunately, we see it all the time. So what happens is, the email gets routed to an individual who might only know half the answer, or they don't really know the answer. And so they're all of a sudden, they're replying with with not the best information, not not the most accurate information. A worst scenario is you, you end up with a situation where the message gets sent to people. And now you're giving two replies back to the same customer. And there are different replies. So you know, one of them might be right, one of them might be wrong, but the customer has no way to know. Right, so. So number two is making sure that the replies you're giving are actually accurate. Number three is a little bit more interesting. Number three is the value of the reply. So you're trying to guide a prospect to a buying decision. So great, you sent out a marketing email, they replied, excellent. That's great news. They're replying with a question, right? They're not just saying, Hey, thanks for your marketing email, they're replying because they got something out of the first thing that you sent them, and now they're looking for more. And so as part of guiding them towards a buying decision, you have to decide what can I provide in this email that is a significant enough value to go to the next step in the buying decision. And, you know, depends on what you're doing, whether that's going to take two back and forth for back and forth. You know, it changes depending on what it is you're trying to try to market right? But I think at each step, you we pause and we go, okay, as I'm sending this reply to the customer, what's the value that I'm providing back to them that will help them guide or help guide them towards a buying decision. So that's sort of the one, two and three,

for the success drivers for your your replies back to the customer. So let's just talk about the tool. And now obviously, you know, we're a vendor of, of this type of tooling. So this is sort of what we speak to all the time. Because you can't accomplish the goal without some some tooling to help you do this. So let's go through those four challenges on the tooling side to figure out what those are. So number one, is workflow. So workflow basically says, Hey, instead of the chaos method of 20, hands on one cookie jar, how am I going to distribute these messages to the people that I have working for me, so number one is, I need to be able to automatically distribute those messages to the team. But I need to do so intelligently. I need to do that in a schedule aware way, I don't want to start sending messages to team members who are off on vacation or just not working today. So that's step one, is have an ability to do automatic distribution. Number two, is to take it a step farther and go, Well, how can I better match up the needs of the message. So in other words, the needs of the prospect of the customer with the skill set of the team that I have of a particular team member that I have. So this is sort of a skills based routing model, right? When we're where we have that assessment of the email coming in, automated through a rules process, and then we guide those emails to the people best able to handle those answers, that's going to improve one of our earlier success drivers, which is the accuracy of the of the reply going back. So you're sending it to trained people who know how to reply, and therefore you're improving that accuracy going back. The other thing we want to do is leverage the investment in brain effort that's already going on with a reply. So you know, you send out a birthday message, prospect replies back, you then reply back to them. And then they reply back again, at this point, now you have somebody who's designated who actually understands the question, they've already dealt with it, they've invested, you know, brain share in it. And we want to make sure that that the follow up message gets assigned to the previous owner of that conversation within your team, if at all possible, you want some smarts around that you don't want to do it if they're not working or, you know, various conditions that you might have exceptions for that. But generally speaking, we want to try to keep that conversation with the same rapper agent who already started handling that. And then lastly, and this one's a bit weird message snoozing, but you actually it comes up all the time, you need an ability to temporarily sort of parking lot a conversation that you're having with with a prospect, because they're off figuring something out there, you're waiting for an answer for them. So you want to have a way to monitor that engagement with that customer, and then resurface it after a period of time automatically. So it kind of puts it back on the radar and you go Okay, you know, I didn't hear back from them. Let me ping them again, and see if we can keep the buying process going. Right. Okay, so the challenge number one is workflow. Oh, sorry, I just you know, this is just an example of this, where we're creating rules, right? So So we, you know, here we've got a an example of Eastern territory, and we've got messages coming in. And we're based I know, this is just a screenshot. But you know, the condition is looking for things that are in the message that indicate this is coming from an Eastern Region, we've got a team of people that can handle that in the eastern region. And then we have a backup person if those are if that person is unavailable. So that's just an example of how that tooling comes to bear in our software. challenge number two is collaboration. So we've got a talent pool here, we want to leverage that talent pool as best we can. And sometimes the best way to do that is to make sure they're able to interact with one another one another, because not everybody knows everything, right? So we want to be able to get get information from the people who have it. And one of the ways to do that is to make sure that we can attach message notes to an email where those notes are exclusive to you know, your users and your prospects and customers don't see those notes, right. So being able to attach those notes easily and have that information circle around as messages get assigned from one user to another user for processing is pretty important in that collaboration. In the collaborative world. You also need to be able to easily reassign messages to to between users and ultimately create stage workflows, right so some processes involve more than one person at your end to be able to handle whatever it is that came in. So you want to be able to go Okay, this person is going to handle steps one two and three. And then it's going to move to the next stage where another reps need to take over and move it from you know, stages four or five and six. So and this is just an example where in you know, we this I just circled our little add in where we can apply notes and so you can add these cumulative set of notes to the message. And that travels with the message as it moves between the various users.

Okay, number three, what are three, analytics.

So, you know, we use the old adage, you can't fix what you can't measure. And unfortunately, you know, in in one person's inbox, there's generally zero ability to measure anything that's going on in an individual's inbox. And that's where the tooling around a team inbox becomes critical, because then you can start to do more interesting things, right? So do you have real time dashboards at your disposal to be able to monitor what's happening right now because if I see what's happening right, now, I have time to fix it right? I can, I can make modifications to the team, I can do what I have to do to try to try to improve the, you know, the reply times, the handling times all that kind of stuff of the messages that I'm working on right. Now, of course, I also want to be able to analyse that over a period of time, so historical performance reports are critical. All of this all of this drives to an SLA driven analysis process, right? So generally speaking, we always want to have a service level agreement, it's internal doesn't have to be externally published, but an internal SLA metric that, that we drive to internally to say, okay, we, you know, we always want to reply to 80% of our messages within four hours, you know, kind of a common SLA, measure there. And so you want to be able to measure against that. And this is where things like I say, like historical reporting, and then dashboards, come into play, so that you can monitor all of these things on an ongoing basis, and then drive iterative improvement within the team, as you discover those numbers. And, you know, from our perspective, we're looking at that, at those performance metrics, not only for the team as a whole, but for obviously, the individuals within that team, right. So you know, we're trying to separate out our rock stars from or not rock stars, and the ones that are struggling, we can we can provide more training, more coaching, to be able to try to improve their,

their numbers as well, right?

Okay, number four is accountability. So, there's a problem that happens with inbound email, which is the hot potato problem, right? So a message comes in, and, you know, you don't want to deal with it. So you just leave it and hopefully somebody else picks it up, if it's in a common box, or you suddenly move it to another person, and it bounces around to four people. And next, you know, you've you've long breached the SLA you have for a reply to that individual. And that's not good. So obviously, we want to know who the actors are in in that type of scenario. And so having what we call complete conversational insight is critical, right? So I need to be able to see a report card on a conversation to know, you know, when did it come in? Who did it get assigned to? How long do they have it for, you know, how many different replies have gone out on that particular message, or how many different messages are part of that conversation. So a whole bunch of things, actually, here's an example of what that history can look like. So this, this one doesn't have, this isn't a long history, but you know, we can see when the message was received, that, you know, it went into an inbox, sort of a backlog state until somebody freed up and then it was assigned to me, in this case, I commented on the message, and then I replied to the message, so I can see kind of, at a glance, all the different steps that the lifecycle of that conversation as it stands to date. And obviously, that will grow as you do more with that conversation. And then there's a little bit of a report card on the lower left, where I can see, you know, how old the oldest open messages what my average reply time is, for that message and other key metrics to do with with that conversation.

So basically, you know, email just acts as a, you know, what we do is provide the tooling for everything that we talked about today, we're a little unique in that we do this specifically for Microsoft Office 365, that were built directly into, basically into Microsoft Office 365. Using the API's that Microsoft provides, we do that because Microsoft represents about a little over 80% of the corporate email market. And so it's kind of the largest pool for us to, to swim in. And it gives us a bunch of benefits. So in our model, we're able to leverage all of the authentication and security that Microsoft provides. So so that, you know, work, let's say, because we're built basically right in Microsoft Office 365, your messages don't leave office 365 they stay there in those team inboxes. And we work directly on top of that, and with those in that mailbox, so it alleviates a whole bunch of kind of security considerations about all of a sudden I have another mail server over here, and I have to and I have to sort of vet the security of that because we don't ever take the messages out of office. For 65. And so we're entirely cloud based, and, and easy to onboard and all that kind of easy, easy stuff to do. So I think that's pretty much it. Oh, I want to reiterate my seven things I really want you to remember as we as we finish up here. So the, you know, there's those this, what does it take to have a successful ROC reply methodology, and that is, speed, accuracy value. So if you can hit those three things in in the replies that you're providing to your customers, you're going to be doing, you're going to be doing great. And, and then you need some tooling to help you with to achieve those, those those success drivers. And those, the tooling needs to hit on these four things, workflow, collaboration, analytics, and accountability. I was quick, I was quick, nobody wants to hear me for 40 minutes. So I was only 21. So I think we're opening up for any questions, if anybody has any. I don't know if I know how to do that other than I think they might end up in the private chat area here. So presumably, I'll see that showing up. If anybody has any questions.

By the way, thank you for taking the time today to join me I know this is okay, at the end of the of the four day processor. So I appreciate that you're willing to show up and and listen to me.

Okay, so the question was, can your automation update a SharePoint list for tracking? So that's not today? That's a good question. We're we're actually working on a number of integrations, kind of in the in the Microsoft ecosystem. So teams dynamics and SharePoint so that that would be relatively easy for us because the graph API's exist for us to do exactly that. So normally, reach out and let me know sort of some specifics about what you're looking there. And then I can give you a more accurate answer of what would be involved in our end to be able to do that. So from a timing perspective, because again, like that stuff's fairly simple for us because we already have the graph API engine working there to do that kind of thing. Now the other question would be from a tracking perspective, whether or not you would need to do that in SharePoint or whether our own tracking systems would provide all the information you need so so I think we would want to look at that both ways, right? can we can we simply give you the information you're looking for without you having to maintain that in a separate place? And then was it saying I guess that is not needed with your back end? But yeah, so I think that's sort of what I was just saying is that ideally we would be giving you the information you're looking for so that would be the first thing to figure out is what what is it what is the specific thing and then we could we could figure out what's the best way to to deliver that but that's that's basically exactly what we do

all the time. Thanks for Okay, I might not be any others. So I won't keep people longer than they need to be here.

So thanks, everybody, again for for coming out and enjoy the last sort of hour of the show here. I know there's like say the closing remarks are coming up. So a number of us will be joining in on that.

Oh, good. We got one more. Hang on,

hold on. We got to thank you. Did you appreciate that. Thank you, Alexandra.

I appreciate that sentiment. Appreciate and appreciate everybody coming out today. Okay, take care, everybody.