Guide to Customer Communications

For more than 10 years, my role has included communications—to prospects, customers, and whoever else.

What I’d like to do here is compile some of what I’ve learned (tips, tricks, best practice) and share some templates to make this easier for you.

If you’re reading this and have tips and hacks you’d like to share, by all means, share in the comments so we can all learn from each other.

Templates

• Email Brief Template - this covers most of what you need to get an email out the door. The thing I love about templates is you avoid the back and forth and you can make sure everything is buttoned up and ready to go. You can also use this when QAing your email to make sure it’s all what you need/want it to be.
• Communications Overview - See the section below, but you can clone this and create for your own reference pages.
• Email QA Checklist - Pair this with the email brief template before scheduling or sending an email.

Streamlining Communications

The most important thing in the beginning is to streamline what’s going out, to who, and when. What you’re trying to understand is ownership, potential areas of overlap, and how we want to, as a team, get communications out to customers.

1. Define a clear owner.?

This person doesn’t have to write or plan all the emails, but they basically serve as an air traffic controller to make sure customers aren’t inundated with communications.

If many people own this, then no one owns it. Don’t let ego get in the way. Establish one person who will protect customers without being annoying about it.

I do air traffic control in Asana. Most of our teams use it/have access to it, and the calendar view allows me to see just how much is happening in a given week. Now, other teams know to ask: “When’s a good time to send X?” Really, once you show them the value and make it a streamlined process (not trying to block anyone from sending things but being thoughtful in approach!), most people are pretty amenable to this approach.

2. Create a list of current communications.

This does not have to follow a customer journey. In fact, aligning to the customer journey might make it much harder to move this forward. Instead, ask around: “Are there any email communications you send to customers on a regular basis?”

You’re just trying to uncover what’s going out, from who, when, and at what cadence.?

For me, this is usually a Google Doc dump, then I organize it from there.

Some teams you might want to connect with:

• Product Marketing
• Events
• Customer Success
• Customer Marketing
• Corporate Comms
• Demand Gen

3. Define communication cadences.

While sometimes emails are going out at a consistent cadence (weekly, monthly, or quarterly), very often they’re inconsistent.

As we know, in marketing, consistency is KEY. People may think it’s rigid to say, “The last week of every month, we’re going to send a product update.” But it is much better to set that expectation and use it as a forcing function to make decisions and communicate updates than be inconsistent in what you send and when you send it.?

4. Define audiences.?

Thinking especially about those recurring communications, you want to define who receives them.

Here are the questions I ask during this process:

• What are our current audiences and where did they come from? What’s the criteria??
• What audiences do we want to have? What’s the criteria for those lists?

Here are some ideas you might want to think about:

• All Customer Contacts (all contacts on account)
• Customer Admins/User Contacts (using the product)
• Primary Admins
• Executive Sponsors
• Billing Contacts
• Customers with Access to X Product/Feature/Module
• Employees

5. Pull all that together into a communications overview.

To make it easy for everyone to reference at a glance, I pull all recurring communications into one slide deck that people can reference.

This includes:

• Topic
• Frequency/Cadence
• Audience
• Who to contact about the email
• An example of the email

If you want to see this in action and copy my deck to use for your own company, here are some slides.

6. Set up task templates to make email sends easy.

Emails are one of those things where there are a lot of ways to mess things up. TRUST ME, I KNOW.?

Especially if you have dependencies on other people for review and feedback, make sure you build that into your task templates.

If you know the send date, you can work backward to make sure everyone has sufficient time to review.

I include the email brief in the task description so my colleague can build the emails, and I use that to QA against during the email review.

Here’s what my customer newsletter template looks like:

Note the “Pull metrics” task. I include this for every communication and have a spreadsheet. No one really cares to get updates on open rates, but it’s always good to look at open rates, click rates, etc. to understand how your emails are performing and how you can improve them. Clicks can also give you insight into what matters most to customers and can inform new content development!

Let’s Talk Product Release Communications

This is where communications get a bit hairy. Product release comms tend to be touched by many teams, and vary depending on how frequently you release updates.

Not trying to write the book on product release comms here, but sharing a few things I’ve learned:

1. Refine segments.

As much as many people are going to hate to hear this, not every customer needs to hear about every update. I know, basically sacrilege, but the reality is not everything pertains to everyone. And you have to think about the message that matters most.

When it comes to releases, I ask myself:

• What’s most important? (is this a solo email or part of a bigger product update?)
• Who needs to hear about this? (just certain segments or impacts all customers?)

For example, let’s say you’re making an update to a feature. If someone regularly uses that feature, they’re really going to want to know. If they use it less regularly, maybe you can get away with including it in a product update roundup. If they never use that feature, is this an update that would get them to want to use it, or can you skip emailing them because it’s just not relevant?

These are hard questions, but to keep your customers from oversaturation, you’ve gotta ask ‘em.

You can segment release comms by:

• Role/user permissions
• Use case
• Module/feature access
• Product/feature usage

And more I’m probably forgetting right now!

IMPORTANT: If you want to segment at this level of account or contact detail, you need to make sure this data maps from your product to your CRM to your marketing automation platform (MAP) or email service provider (ESP). Segmentation gets funky when you manually pull lists for each send. Aim for dynamically updated lists based on well-defined fields.

2. How much do they need to know?

On the note of “not everything is relevant to everyone,” the wording also needs to vary.

How does the message change based on access/no access, usage/no usage, etc.?

For example, I once worked on a product release where we segmented several different ways based on how customers used other parts of the product.

If they use X and Y, send message A.

If they use but not Y, send message B.

This is especially helpful if the customer may not have context/frame of reference for what you’re talking about. Always go back to the customers’ mindset: What do they know/not know based on where they’re at in their journey today?

That will inform not just copy, but also call-to-action (CTA) and next steps.?

3. What questions will people have and what do they need to hear?

When I’m writing and reviewing customer comms, I think about the questions people are likely to have. Then I link to support articles or let them know who they can direct questions to (e.g., support, CSM, etc.).

I also like to give as much reassurance as I can. “Don’t worry—this won’t impact ____.” “You’ll receive a heads up before migration happens.” That kind of thing. You have to think that changes on your side impact THEIR job. Put them at ease as much and as often as you can.

Give Other Teams a Heads Up

Most teams do not mind you emailing your customers. What bothers them is when they have no freaking clue what was sent.?

I’ve seen support teams reaching out to marketing because a customer wrote a support ticket about registration for an upcoming event and they had no clue what it was.

I’ve seen CSMs blinded in customer conversations because an update email went to their customers with no visibility.

Here’s my biggest tip: Send a copy of the email to customer-facing teams in advance.

I call this a “heads up email.” You can forward the test copy of the email the day before it goes out.?You can also post about in Slack for additional visibility.

Here’s what I include in my email to those teams:

• Forwarded copy of the email
• Send date/time
• Who is receiving the email
• Who to contact with questions

And, because people will inevitably ask for customer comms “Is my customer on this list?” “My customer asked that so-and-so be added to the email,” I also link to the communications overview and how people can sign up to a distribution list.

Here’s an actual heads-up email I send:

Hey everyone!?

Just another heads up email so you're aware of customer communications going out.

The customer newsletter is going out tomorrow at 7am ET.

Who receives this email? Admins & executive sponsors who are subscribed to our email communications receive this email.?

What's in this email? Content and events. This is a value-add newsletter. The Monthly Product Updates still go out on their own (send time next Thursday, March 28th).?

Can I forward this email? Feel free! People can also subscribe to our monthly newsletter.

For any additional questions, please let me know.

Have a great day!

OK, that's all that's top of mind for now. But feel free to ask questions and let's keep building on this!