Top reasons why people ignore your customer communications

Your writing team slaves over your customer communications. It’s too bad nobody’s reading them. Sounds harsh, but it may be more true than you think. Despite hours, days, weeks of carefully crafting content, if your language and tone don’t resonate with your customers, all your hard work may be getting ignored.

Here are three of the top pitfalls, and what you can do to help ensure your customer communications get the attention and action they need.

Your subject lines lack the “why to care”

Your customers are deluged with emails every day, so you’ve got a lot of competition for their attention. An email with a generic, product-oriented subject line often gets ignored because people triage what looks important or relevant, and this doesn’t. There’s no urgency, no compelling win to entice them. They might be missing out on something important, but they may never know, or find out too late.

While it’s regrettable for your marketing efforts, it could increase your risk and expense for managing existing customers. Suppose you need customers to respond to an important call to action. If you don’t create any urgency in the subject line, they may skip that email, which could set off a costly ripple effect. For example, you may need to send multiple follow-ups until you get a response. Or, you might proceed with a change and when customers find out about it, they feel caught unaware, and flood your call center with questions and complaints.

 

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