Email analytics guide for inbound sales and customer teams

Email is still the preferred communication channel for most customers. Companies need to understand how best to utilize email as a sales and customer service channel to maximize success.

Internal email analytics measure how your employees engage with your customers via email. Gathering email analytics offers invaluable insights to help customer service and sales teams maintain high levels of customer care and convert sales at scale

How can companies leverage email analytics to improve response times and customer experience? Let’s find out.

What is email analytics?

Email analytics is a method of tracking various statistics and data points associated with email activity.

Typical email analytics include the number of emails sent and received, average reply times, email traffic by time of day or day of the week, and top senders and recipients.

Organizations that use email analytics to track their teams’ email performance gain greater insight into their email strategies for customer service and sales. This enables organizations to use actionable intelligence in email activities to improve their sales and customer service efforts.

The importance of email analytics in organizations

Companies that handle large volumes of customer emails can benefit from email analytics. Email analytics provide valuable data that can influence decision-making and motivate team members.

By gathering and analyzing essential email analytics companies can identify weak points in the communication chain and provide goals for teams to work towards. Since email is the preferred channel of communication, it makes sense to understand how your employees are actively engaging with this channel.

Who should use email analytics for decision making

Email analytics offer helpful insights to sales managers and customer service managers. Email analytics is there to help identify areas of improvement that will lead to better response times, happier customers, and more sales success.

Challenges of email analytics

Email analytics tools are not simply nice-to-haves. They fulfill a vital role in the successful running of sales and customer service teams that deal with large volumes of incoming emails, helping solve challenges that include:

1️⃣ Lack of native email analytics

Email is widely used as the primary method of communication, with some teams receiving hundreds of emails daily. Yet native email analytics offered by Gmail and Outlook are too basic to provide insights that will inform sales and customer service strategies.

• Do you know how many emails you receive and how many you sent?
• Do you know how long it takes you to respond to emails?

Without this information, it is hard to understand how and where to improve and how to allocate resources correctly. Native email analytics do not allow you to set goals or custom SLAs for sales and customer service teams to work towards – leaving everything to chance.

There must be a better way!

2️⃣ No visibility over email reply times

According to research, 77% of customers say that valuing their time is the most important thing a company can do to provide a quality customer experience.

How is your team treating a customer’s time?

Does your team know what their average reply time is?

You could be missing out on valuable sales by taking too long to respond, or worse yet, missing a sales enquiry entirely.

What’s beyond email analytics?

Email is still growing in popularity as a primary channel for customer support and sales prospects. Keeping track of emails and requests has become hugely challenging for teams, especially when there’s such stiff competition for customers and customers themselves expect high levels of customer experience at every interaction.

Most email analytics focus on how customers engage with the emails an organization sends, whether these are sales or customer service emails. Internal email analytics perform a valuable function by tracking internal email performance to drive optimization in sales and customer service processes. This includes measuring response rates, average time to reply, email volumes, and peak hours across teams and individual team members. Without this level of visibility, managers lack deeper insight into the team’s email performance and may struggle to drive improvements in sales and customer service teams’ success.

Email performance can directly impact customer satisfaction and sales performance. In a recent study, customers revealed that customer service and time to reply are the key differentiators between competitor brands.

To optimize internal email performance, use the timetoreply Optimizer. The Optimizer is designed to improve email productivity by providing individuals with real-time key email metrics benchmarked against the rest of the team.

How email analytics software solves the challenges

Enhance native email analytics with specialist analytic software to gain the visibility required to make data-driven decisions.

Companies using email analytics software unlock access to vital data-driven insights as well as powerful automation tools that can boost the productivity and performance of customer-facing teams.

Enjoy the following benefits when deploying email analytic software:

1️⃣ Gain deeper insight into your teams’ email performance.

Popular email platforms such as Outlook and Gmail offer only basic email analytics. For high-performance sales and customer service teams, native email analytics won’t cut it.

A professional email analytics platform uncovers vital data about your teams’ email performance, informing customer engagement improvements.

With a clear picture of your current performance, you can set targets to work towards and use email analytics to track your progress.

2️⃣ Transparency over your email reply times

Quick email response times are one of the best ways to boost your sales success and drive higher levels of customer satisfaction.

Companies that respond to a sales query within an hour are sixty times more likely to qualify the lead than companies that take 24 hours to respond.

Email analytics software can bring transparency to your teams’ email reply times to drive continuous improvements in your teams’ email productivity.

Introducing timetoreply

timetoreply is an advanced email analytics solution that easily integrates with all leading email platforms, including Gmail and Outlook.

Through a simple integration, our platform connects to individual or shared mailboxes. It immediately starts producing actionable insights into your teams’ email performance.

ISO27001 and Google Security Certification provide high levels of security and support compliance with data and privacy regulations, including SOC2 and GDPR. And our public API unlocks a world of possibilities through integrations with best-of-breed third-party tools and applications.

What are the benefits of using an email analytics software such as timetoreply?

💫Benefit 1: Accurate insights📈

timetoreply empowers organizations with accurate data regarding their email reply times, volumes, peak hours, and other metrics. These analytics improve how sales and customer service teams use email to engage with customers.

Our user-friendly dashboard and comprehensive reporting capabilities bring clarity and intelligence to email analytics, whether your teams use Gmail or Outlook.

With these insights, companies are equipped to make valuable changes to increase efficiency and performance. Identify team members who need additional support, reallocate resources based on peak volume times and set goals for teams to reach.

💫Benefit 2: Improve response times ⏳

Keep your sales team responding quickly with timetoreply’s convenient tracking tool that alerts users to emails approaching custom SLAs. This ensures that your team focuses on being the first to respond to a sales query. Since 78% of sales go to the company that is first to reply, focusing on response times can boost sales and, ultimately, revenue.

Customer service response times are also critical for a good customer experience. In a recent study, ‍61% of customers said they would stop buying from a company due to poor customer service. Customers who are happy with the service they receive tend to buy more and recommend your business to friends and family, boosting revenue.

💫Benefit 3: Goal setting 🎯

Use timetoreply’s goal setting feature to let teams know what reply times they should be aiming for. timetoreply Optimizer allows individual team members to see their reply times at a glance without leaving their email client.

Individuals can also measure their performance against the set goals as well as against other team members. This feature has proven to motivate team members and allow them to track their progress.

Key takeaways

Email performance is a critical indicator of business success, influencing the customer experience and impacting sales.

Companies that want to optimise team performance to increase their sales and customer experience need to take note of their internal email performance analytics, including:

• first reply time
• average overall reply time
• inbound messages
• outbound messages
• email threads marked as closed
• emails awaiting response

By tracking these email metrics, teams and individuals will be equipped to measure their performance and work towards set goals.

Email analytics tools such as timetoreply Optimizer allows individuals to view their performance compared to the average team and create goals to improve email reply times.

Ready to give timetoreply a try? Schedule a demo now and discover how to boost your customer service capabilities.