Best Practice
Many of our customer’s credit teams are proudly accredited by the CICM (click here) but even those without that accolade exhibit behaviours that show they are passionate about the quality and professionalism with which they run their credit teams.
As corporate partners of the CICM, we are conscientious about best practice: indeed, our core Credit Management platform, Corrivo, has been designed with their best practice guidelines in mind.
Email footers though, are nothing to do with our AR software though; or are they?
Email Footers
You would be surprised how often your external emails are seen not just by your customers but by other stakeholders, and even by potential employees. The frequency with which your emails, and the footers are seen, makes them perfect for driving home important messages and providing ‘right first time’ contact information.
Our clients also seem to use email footers to establish themselves in the mind of the reader as a team with high standards at best practice at its core. Hopefully, you will take inspiration from them and raise the visibility of your professional credit team too.
When we take on a new client we recommend that they include in their email footers a link to the sign up page for their customer facing portal. This helps hasten the process of getting invoice customers migrated from paper or PDF attachment to portal based invoice collection.
Why migrate? Because it is greener than sending attachments, customers can self-serve documents and return any time for copies, and the customer effectively sees a statement or snapshot of their credit position every time they visit. This greatly reinforces the message to make payment and has been shown to reduce credit balances by around 30% across a customer base, because the customer becomes more aware of their total outstanding.
Of course, they can put 2 and 2 together and work out that unpaid will eventually lead to accounts going on stop which will have consequences for their purchasing teams. The point is, portal based invoice presentation improves AR performance.
What’s the Link?
So what is the link between best practice, email footers and Corrivo customer invoice portals? Well, apart from being useful in the early days of a company implementing Corrivo for its credit team, it’s a great way to declare your team’s standards and show just how much you care.
Many of our clients permanently leave a links in the credit team’s email footers and here is a breakdown of one such: anonymised. They start by stating their aims:
We aim to deliver outstanding customer service through our multiple solutions as follows :
- A 24/7 Customer digital portal
Customers can access their account & copy documentation online.
Demonstration – https://videos.corrivo.io/introduction.mp4
Customer sign up – insert link
- Customer financial support
Through our ground breaking suite of Customer finance tools – insert link
- Customer Service Feedback :
For x Division team follow insert links for separate business unit contacts if relevant
For General feedback please email creditfeedback@insert domain
- A 24/7 automated credit card payment line
Call insert telephone number with your seven digit account number and card details.
- For escalations
Please contact insert name on insert email address or insert mobile number
Thank you.
What do you think?
We’ve shown one example above and include below some general tips for email footers. Importantly, tell us what you think this says about the credit team and the business and share your thoughts with me on LinkedIn or by email using sales@datainterconnect.co.uk.
General Guidelines
- Keep It Simple – don’t overload it
- Make It Mobile-Friendly – get help from IT and avoid photos or images apart from logos and quality / membership logos – remember, in 2019, mobile accounted for 42% of all email opens – keep text large enough
- Use buttons – make links clickable with a finger so they are mobile friendly and highly visible
- Use trackable links – if you include any calls to action and links get help from marketing to make them trackable so you can evaluate their performance for insight
- Prioritise hierarchically – put the most important content first or it may never be scrolled to and seen
- Include company standard legal footer text – this is in addition to, not instead of your standard company footer so make sure that remains in tact and is not displaced
Wrapping it up
Please let me know how your credit teams sets expectations and reinforces its working practices in a dynamic relationship with customers.
Will you add an email footer or is there something else that gets your point across? Email me using sales@datainterconnect.co.uk. I look forward to hearing from you.
