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How to Measure and Improve Your
Email Response Times
Nobody likes to wait for a reply, your leads and customers included.
By ge몭ing back to them sooner than they expect it, you can stand
out from your competition and build their trust in you.
So몭e Couwenbergh, Guest writer
Last updated: May 3, 2021
But how quickly do people expect a response? Are those expectations
realistic? And what can you do to improve (and track) your email
response time? These are the questions this article covers.
How quickly do people expect an email
response?
Email response time expectations di몭er quite a bit depending on the
context emails are being sent in. Someone contacting the customer
service of a company will have di몭erent expectations than someone
sending a personal email, who has yet other expectations than someone
emailing a coworker.
We'll break down email response time etique몭e across di몭erent contexts
below but 몭rst, let's have a look at what the average email response
time is.
What is the average email response time?
of people respond to work emails within approximately 2 hours. If
we extend that to personal emails, the most common response time
drops to just 2 minutes. On top of that, 90% of all emails that get a
reply, get it within 2 days.
50%
Sales email response time
A study by InsideSales.com showed that companies who reply to sales
inquiries 몭rst, get 35-50% of sales. On top of that, your chances of
ge몭ing a lead into your sales process are 21 times higher when you reply
within no more than 5 minutes vs 30 minutes of a lead making 몭rst
contact.
Yes, you need a quick response time, but this data also needs to be
taken with a grain of salt as it doesn't di몭erent between leads who 몭ll
out your contact form and de몭nitely respect a reply, and leads who, for
example, download a whitepaper and probably don't expect you to get
in touch with them.
That being said, according to the same study, the average sales email
response time lies around 61 hours. This is pre몭y slow and to a prospect,
this says that a company does not respect their time, isn't very
responsive, and doesn't really want their business.
Customer support email response time
According to SuperO몭ce, the average response time for customer
service replies is 12 hours and 10 minutes. However, 88% of customers
expect to get a reply within 60 minutes.
That's a massive gap between expectations and reality, and not one you
can ignore because other research has shown that fast response times
are the most important sign of good customer service according to
customers.
Business email response time
According to MailTime.com, 52% of people expect a reply to a workrelated email within 12 to 24 hours, and only 3% accept having to wait
for a week to get a response.
This doesn't seem to be much of an issue as a survey from 2013 among
500 US employees found that one-third of them replied to work emails
within 15 minutes, and one-quarter within 30 minutes.
It's important to note that times have changed since 2013. More and
more teams are working remotely and spread out over di몭erent time
zones. This doesn't have to impact your remote team performance in
terms of communication with external parties, but it might mean that
you're a bit more lenient when it comes to internal response times.
While the studies mentioned above give a good indication of what your
email response times should be like, it's important to note that company
context plays a role as well. If your team uses a messaging tool like
Slack, for example, for all urgent internal communication, there won't be
such a high expectation on coworkers to respond to emails quickly.
Where do your company's email response times lie in comparison to the
average email response time? If you don't know, it's time to start
tracking.
How to Measure Response Time
Gmelius’ email analytics for teams makes it super easy to track your
average email response times straight from within Gmail. A detailed
report will tell you how long it takes team members to respond to emails,
how many conversations (or support tickets) they've closed since you
started tracking, and what their average time to 몭nalize a conversation
is.
Aside from tracking the response times for individual team members,
you can also gain email performance insights for the whole team, per
project, or per shared inbox you created. This means you can track
conversation response and close times across di몭erent projects and
pipelines.
On top of that, Gmelius shows you how many active email conversations
your team has at any given moment, how many active email threads are
happening on average in a day, and which day of the week is your
busiest in terms of email activity.
This information allows you to adjust your team's work몭ow to its most
productive and busiest times.
Sounds interesting? Learn more about Gmelius’ email analytics for teams
here.
How to Improve Your Email Response
Time
Once you've identi몭ed bo몭lenecks and opportunities, you can create
email automations in Gmail to help improve your team's email response
times.
But 몭rst, you need to de몭ne what those response times should look like.
1. Create Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
In industries like travel and logistics, Service Level Agreements often
exist as explicit contracts between service providers and their
customers. They tell customers exactly what kind of service they can
expect and when they can expect it.
While such agreements may not be common within your industry, se몭ing
these types of rules internally is a great way to make sure everyone
knows how to handle emails. Additionally, they give you something to
compare your team's actual response times to without having to rely on
what you think would be acceptable response times.
Your SLAs outline how long it should take your team to reply to each
type of email they get. That means you may have di몭erent rules for:
emails from suppliers.
email from other team members.
emails from other departments within the company.
emails from customers.
emails from leads.
The guidelines within this policy should be based on the standard email
response times for your industry, target customer, and the type of
emails it concerns, but also your brand positioning (perhaps fast
customer service is one of your brand's core values).
Even if you frequently need to deal with complicated requests, you can
have as a guideline that you'll send a quick initial reply to let the
recipient know you're working on it and will get back to them with a
reply soon.
2. Set up alerts for SLA breaches
As you don't want to spend your time making sure SLAs are being
followed, it's best to set up alerts within Gmail that will notify you when
there's an SLA breach. With Gmelius, there are two ways to do this:
1.
by having emails that haven't been replied-to fast enough
automatically added to a shared label.
2.
by adding a color-coded tag to these types of emails.
For both options, you can set a speci몭c time (24 hours, two days, …)
after which the shared label or tag should be added.
By visually 몭ltering out emails that haven't received a timely reply, you
avoid them falling into the cracks as new emails keep coming in.
3. Auto-assign emails
Another rule Gmelius allows you to set up, is to automatically assign
certain emails to certain team members. This doesn't just save you time,
it also allows for a more e몭cient work몭ow as team members can focus
on those email tasks they're most pro몭cient in.
On top of that, Gmelius' built-in analytics also show you how all
incoming emails are distributed across your team so you can easily see
who has too many to handle and re-assign emails accordingly. This way,
you can make sure the workload is evenly spread out and prevent
bo몭lenecks from occurring.
4. Set up autoresponders
It's always best to send a real reply whenever you can, but if you receive
a high amount of support tickets every day or there are certain emails
that always require the same answer, it's a good idea to set up
autoresponders for those.
Another reason to set up an autoresponder is when you only reply to
emails during certain times and want to remind your customers of this
so they don't expect an answer straight away when they email you at 11
p.m. on a Saturday.
Gmail only provides an out-of-o몭ce autoresponder but there are barely
any options to customize it so the best way to set up an autoresponder
is by using Gmelius Rules.
5. Automate repetitive emails
When you often need to send out the same type of email, you can
create customizable email templates to use. Just like Gmail canned
responses, these templates can be added to your compose window with
the click of a bu몭on, but they also o몭er a lot more on top of that:
organize your email templates in an easily searchable library right in
your compose window.
use variables to automatically personalize your emails.
share well-performing email templates with other team members.
Aside from email templates being time-saving, they also ensure that
your recipients get all the information you need in a clear format.
Conclusion
Achieving and maintaining good email response times is important for
the overall performance of your team. It increases sales, keeps
customers happy, and prevents you from annoying coworkers and
creating bo몭lenecks within your work몭ows.
On top of that, using Service Level Agreements and automating email
response work몭ows avoids your team from ge몭ing overwhelmed and
helps keep them motivated to tackle whichever emails comes their way.
With Gmelius, you can make Gmail help you to improve your response
times by se몭ing up automated work몭ows and alerts for SLA breaches.
Sign up today and try it out for free.
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