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Transactional emails are usually sent when a customer has placed an order like shipping confirmation emails and order confirmation emails. But they could also include reminders for abandoned cart checkouts, lost password requests, or suggestions for future purchases.

A study by Experian found that transactional order emails average $0.75 per open compared to $0.13 for bulk mailings on orders. But how can simple notifications increase customer lifetime value? How can they drive repeat purchases?

Tips for upgrading transactional emails to boost sales

Try these three tips to use transactional emails to grow your ecommerce business.

1. Leverage product recommendations to upsell customers
2. Ask for reviews to build trust
3. Drive repeat purchases with discount codes

1) Leverage product recommendations to upsell customers

One way you can maximize the power of product recommendations is to add them in your transactional emails. How effective are product recommendations in maximizing your profits? Intelliverse found that 45% of consumers are more likely to shop on a site that offers personalized recommendations and  56% of online customers are more likely to return to a site that offers product recommendations.
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For example, Costco’s order confirmation email has product recommendations that are based on top categories. It’s nothing special, but it can drive repeat purchases.

Another tip is to send personalized product recommendations based on a consumer’s purchase history or behavior. This way, you’ll be upselling products that customers will likely be interested in. For example, Amazon’s order confirmation email includes recommendations based on a customer’s past purchase.

Adding personalized product recommendations in your transactional emails make a lot of sense because they have high open rates. In fact, transactional emails have open rates that are 3x to 4x higher than the regular marketing email. That’s because customers often check transactional emails to confirm the success of their transactions.

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2) Ask for reviews to build trust

Another type of transactional email you can use is the feedback email which is sent a few days or weeks after the customer has received or used the product. Why are product reviews important to your retail store? Reviews determine whether people will buy your product. Additionally, while writing reviews don’t directly lead to repeat purchases, they’re pretty effective at getting other customers to buy a product.

Numerous studies consistently found that star ratings and reviews have a big impact on sales. In fact, BrightLocal found that 44% prefer products with reviews within the past month and Reevo found that reviews can result in an 18% increase in sales.

And contrary to popular belief, negative reviews might do you some good. Capterra found that 52% of buyers trust a product more when they see a fewer negative reviews. After all, there’s no perfect product. You can ask for reviews by sending a simple feedback email like J. Crew:

Writing a review seems easy, but it does take some time and effort. That said, you should thank customers because any kind of feedback is useful for your Shopify store. Here’s an example of how J. Crew thanks their customers:

You don’t always have to ask for long reviews, sometimes a star rating might do.

For example, JCPenney asks for a star rating a few days after the customer has received the product. They also give customers the option to write a long review through clicking the “Write a Review” button.

They also incentive customers by giving them a chance to win $1000.

You can also provide other incentives like discounts and coupons in exchange for the review. After all, people are more motivated when they get something in return.

Related: Our guide to email marketing automation for ecommerce.

3) Drive repeat purchases with discount codes

Selling to your current customers is a lot easier and cheaper than converting a first-time customer. A study by Harvard Business Review found that acquiring new customers is about five to 25 times more expensive than selling to the ones you already have.

Of course, old customers are more likely to buy your product because they have experiences with your product or service. If they like what they purchased, there’s a good chance they’ll buy from your store again.

In contrast, first-time customers are a lot harder to convince. You need to get them through the marketing funnel and send ads, emails and other marketing content to convince them to buy from your store.

That said—how do you increase repeat purchases in your retail store? A popular trick is to send next purchase discount codes. Offer a small limited-time discount if they make another purchase.

Start customizing your transactional emails

The strategies in this post are an easy way to generate additional sales and revenue with some minor tweak. While Shopify doesn’t allow you to directly customize their transactional emails, you can start with an email template and then use a tool like Spently. Use their drag and drop functionality to add product recommendations, unique discounts and referral codes to your transactional emails.

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I’m Colin Waters and I’m the Director of Customer Experience at The Feed. You might know me from my experience at BrüMate, where I was the Associate Director of Customer Experience. In three years, I worked my way up from answering tickets and being on the front line with customers to overseeing the entire customer experience team. 

My different roles have shown me the various ways to adapt your customer service to fit your team’s and customer’s needs.

In this article, I’ll walk you through the different types of customer service, support channels, strategies, and philosophies you can offer based on what your company requires.

3 types of customer service + when and how to use each

Customer service is kind of like a sandwich. You’ve got your bread or the necessary foundational elements like a great customer service strategy and philosophy, and then you’ve got your support channels which can be more varied and customizable, like the sandwich fillings.

We’ll start with support channels, which you can take care of first, and move onto the strategies and philosophies of customer service. Let’s get into it!

Channels

There are many different support channels out there. But instead of offering them all — which can actually harm your support team in the long run — take a look at your customer service responsibilities, resources, and business needs to figure out which channels make the most sense for you.

Here’s a rundown of the different support channels you can offer and what they’re best used for.

Email

Email is flexible in terms of the type of customer inquiries they’re best for (most of them!) and turnaround time, unlike more instantaneous and short-form support channels like live chat and social media.

Provide email support if…

• Customer inquiries are lengthy and detailed. Email is best suited for comprehensive responses that can handle file attachments and additional resources like images, videos, and links.
• Your operating hours are flexible. Customers can reach out to your support team outside of regular business hours, no matter their time zone.
• You deal with sensitive issues. Email provides a private platform for discussing sensitive matters that customers might not want to share publicly.
• You provide technical support. You can easily share resources like documents, videos, and screenshots in a continuous conversation that would be harder to do through other support channels like voice or social media.

Social media

Social media customer service is fairly new. However, as 26% of people learn about a product through social media, it’s a good idea to follow the trend and use your social media platforms to not only assist new customers, but take note of feedback. 

Provide social media support if…

• You want to reach a younger audience. With Gen Z on apps like TikTok and Instagram, offering your presence and assistance where they are in their free time can boost exposure and conversions.
• Your marketing strategy is social media-focused. Take advantage of the brand recognition you’re getting by personally connecting with followers and getting them closer to your brand.
• Many of your brand mentions are on social media. Mentions are a fantastic way to build a connection with your followers and turn them into customers, exhibit how your brand prioritizes customer service, and collect criticisms to pass along to your team.
• You have a product or service that’s going viral. Get excited with your customers, or provide important information like restock timing or shipping delays. 

Live chat, chatbots & automation

If your main source of traffic comes from your company’s website, using live chat or chatbots can easily capture your customer inquiries and lessen the load for your team. Sometimes, however, chatbots may provide inconsistent answers — that’s when using automation to create templated conversations will be your best option.

Provide live chat, chatbots, and automation if…

• You receive a lot of customer inquiries. A chat widget with automatic responses or a chatbot is one of the easiest ways to decrease tickets that contain the same inquiries. 
• You’re a small team. With fewer hands on board, routing tickets to AI and automatic responses can keep your customer service reps focused on more complex issues. 
• It’s the holiday season or peak hours. Getting a barrage of tickets, especially on Black Friday-Cyber Monday when most people are hunting for sales, can be a nightmare for customer service teams. Let a chat widget be your first line of defense.
• You sell personal or specialized products. Think of products like skincare and health supplements when most of your consumers will need to divulge personal information to get the answers they need. With live chat, customers can resolve their worries with an empathetic agent on their side.

Help center

A help center (also referred to as a knowledge base) is a collection of self-service resources that customers and employees can use to resolve questions and issues. They can contain FAQs, troubleshooting guides, instruction manuals, video tutorials, and more. 

Provide a help center or knowledge base if…

• You update or change your products regularly. If you release new versions of your products or services every year, a one-stop hub to update documents will be extremely helpful. 
• You sell specialized products. If your products need additional explanation before using them, a knowledge base can answer all customer questions and curiosities.
• You want to optimize your website for SEO. On top of being a helpful resource hub, a knowledge base can point eyes to your website. In turn, it earns your brand more exposure and new customers.

On BrüMate, our Help Center is made with Gorgias. It’s organized in sections like FAQs, shipping, and returns and exchanges which can be modified when our product lineup expands.

Voice, messaging & SMS

Voice support can still be an extremely valuable channel when you want to resolve tricky situations. In fact, 42% of Americans still prefer to resolve customer service issues via phone conversations.  

Provide voice support if…

• You deal with technical and complex issues. Having a support agent empathize and understand a customer’s problems is crucial not only to boost customer satisfaction but also to lay out solutions in a clear way.
• You serve customers internationally. Language barriers can make written communication difficult. With voice support, it can be easier to resolve issues when you can talk through instructions in real-time.
• Your customer issues are time-sensitive. Offering phone support can give customers an option to resolve urgent issues within minutes, instead of waiting for an email or social media reply back.

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Strategies

Depending on your goals as a customer service team, there are a few strategies you can choose from. In my experience, employing a mix of strategies allows you to adapt to more types of customers, resulting in higher customer satisfaction. 

Let’s look at the four customer service strategies, omnichannel, proactive, self-service, and personalized. I’ll go through what they are, their purpose, how to employ them, and my experience with each strategy at BrüMate.

Omnichannel support

What is it? Omnichannel customer service is offering support on multiple channels to create a seamless customer service experience. 

Purpose: To make your support as accessible as possible, so all customers can reach you from whichever channel they prefer.

How to implement it: Use a helpdesk that can combine support channels. 

At BrüMate, we use Gorgias to combine all customer conversations in one tool. Our main channels are email, social media, and live chat. 

Using Gorgias as a single source of truth for all of our channels helps to ensure that our customers get consistent responses. And, it means that all messages from a customer, regardless of channel, are visible in one place and can be handled by the same agent.

Proactive support

What is it? Proactive customer service is an approach to customer service that anticipates customer needs and meets customer expectations.

Purpose: To lessen the effort customers need to make to find answers to their questions.

How to implement it: Monitor your most common customer tickets and implement resources in advance to avert future inquiries.

We work closely with our marketing and digital teams to deflect issues as they come in and solve them at the root. For example, based on customer feedback, we might add more details to our product pages, update language at checkout, or highlight specific reviews. 

Self-service support

What is it? Self-service support is a customer service approach that empowers customers to independently find solutions to their problems using available resources and tools.

Purpose: To speed up resolution time by allowing customers to find answers on their own without waiting for an agent.

How to implement it: Provide self-service options (like a Help Center, automated responses in chat, or ways to easily track orders) at all customer touchpoints, from pre-sales and product inquiries to order status emails and returns. 

On the BrüMate website, we display helpful self-service resources in the Gorgias chat widget so that it’s easy for folks to get the help they’re looking for quickly. 

We strategically show links for customers to check order status, get warranty or return information, or learn more about the products that would best fit their lifestyles. 

We also leverage this area to highlight new products or call out any major issues at the moment (i.e. preorders, shipping delays, etc.) and drive those back to more detailed help center articles and resources.

Personalized support

What is it? Personalized customer service focuses on personalizing customer interactions. 

Purpose: To enhance customer satisfaction by customizing interactions to each customer’s preferences and needs.

How to implement it: When interacting with customers, adjust to their voice, acknowledge their history, and suggest solutions relevant to their preferences.

A majority of the BrüMate customer base is female and, fittingly, the majority of our Customer Experience agents are female as well.. This takes empathy to a new level since our team knows exactly what our customers are going through, whether they’re a mom of three or a college student. We’re also big brand ambassadors which helps make the connection more individualized.

Philosophies

What are your priorities when it comes to customer service? Do you prioritize speed? Or would you rather go slow and build out from there? 

The way you approach customer service will dictate the overall customer experience. Like customer service strategies, your team can follow more than one philosophy. But make sure to pick one philosophy as your north star to create a clear path towards your goals.

Below are four customer service philosophies that can help establish brand loyalty.

Long-term foundation

Since BrüMate’s CX team is still pretty small, our core philosophy is to build a strong foundation. Delivering good customer service starts with making sure you’ve got all your bases covered, so you can prevent headaches along the way. Make it easy for the customer to find you early in their experience and that CX is a valuable resource along any point in their journey.

When I’m onboarding new agents, I want them to take their time learning our process. For instance, our team is very particular with naming conventions for ticket tags and Macros. While some will find it tedious, the upside is anybody could come in — agent or not — and start answering tickets without too much guidance.

The customer is (not) always right

As a customer service representative, it’s easy to realize that the customer is not always right. Products wear down over time, delays happen, and unpredictable changes come up. The goal is to prepare your team to handle difficult situations that still align with your brand’s values.

For example, I’ve had to deal with a customer being irritated because we couldn’t cancel an order a few hours after it was placed. From their point of view, cancellations should be a given. They were unaware of the complex behind-the-scenes process and that our team will start fulfilling an order immediately after it is placed. 

We started educating customers on our order fulfillment process and giving them insight on the reason the cancellation was no longer available. Fortunately, the context allowed them to cool down and forgive the inconvenience. We also provided them with options once the item was delivered.

Balancing human support & automation

Automation is handy for handling smaller customer hiccups. It’s important to note, though, that the best customer service balances automation with human touch. 

When customers reach out to the BrüMate support team, we try our best to keep them with the same agent until their ticket is resolved. This way, their experience with BrüMate is tied to a personal connection. On occasion, I have a few customers who I prefer to work directly with to resolve their issue to ensure they are satisfied with their experience. They are even willing to wait until I’ve returned from vacation due to this level of personalized touch.

Surprise and delight

The concept of "surprise and delight" is a philosophy that makes the customer experience unexpected but delightful. This can come in the form of exceptional, personal customer service (like at BrüMate!) or through gifts and discounts.

Our customer support team at BrüMate plays a pivotal role in building strong relationships. We like to turn the perception of customer service upside down and give customers a pleasant experience. It's an amazing thing to hear when customers mention our agents by name because we've gone above and beyond to build a connection with them.

Customer support as a revenue center 

Many people think of customer service teams as a way to resolve problems. I see our team as a marketing and revenue driving machine that can take it a step further by taking a sales approach. This means support’s main goals are to divert unsatisfied customers by using methods of upselling and cross-selling.

Your team should be experts and help close orders. Incentive your team to be one part customer service and sales. I guarantee you’ll see results! 

With a help desk you can deliver support whenever, however, and wherever you need

Gorgias makes multitasking look like a breeze. Its simple user interface makes it easy for new and experienced agents to use. You can speak to multiple customers at one time across different channels and integrate with ecommerce tools like Shopify, Affirm, and Yotpo without leaving the window.

Take a look at what Gorgias has helped some of my other favorite CX brands do:

• Pit Viper’s first response time and CSAT skyrocketed to 4.9
• Oger boosted its first response time by 69% 
• Kulani Kinis saved $400K in refunds by using Gorgias and Loop Returns 

If you’re ready to join me and these other amazing companies using Gorgias, book a demo today.

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Have you ever wondered how other leading ecommerce stores manage customer support, especially when they are using Gorgias? We love identifying these trends and wanted to see what integrations have been the most useful in our customers' ecommerce tech stacks so far.

In order to help you bring all your customer data in one place and offer truly exceptional, personalized support, here are the top 10 integrations being used by Gorgias customers:

1. Email, specifically Gmail
2. Gorgias Chat
3. Facebook and Instagram
4. SMS apps
5. Klaviyo
6. Recharge
7. Phone, either our native solution or Aircall
8. Yotpo
9. Smile
10. ChannelReply

1. Email, specifically Gmail

If you've been worried that email is becoming obsolete in the age of chat boxes and SMS support, don't be. Email is the leading support channel on Gorgias, used by 67% of customers.

This make sense. While faster, more instantaneous methods of communications are becoming common, email is still the primary channel to answer complicated support questions and send transactional messages like shipping updates, return logistics, and order/cancellation confirmations.

Of email integrations, Gmail is the leading provider with 59% of Gorgias customers having it active.

To learn more about our Gmail integration, click here.

2. Gorgias chat

Chat support is the second most common channel we see our merchants using, in order to offer real-time communication in addition to traditional emails or tickets. And thanks to our native chat integrations, it's easier than ever to launch a chat widget on your website.

57% of Gorgias merchants use our native chat integrations to offer real-time support.

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This allows your shoppers to talk to an agent faster, but also presents a great opportunity to implement self-service options so they can help themselves. (Our Self-Service Chat Portal can help with that!)

3. Facebook and Instagram

Managing inquiries on social media and gaining insights into the conversations happening in those communities is te next priority for our merchants.

Over 50% of Gorgias brands are integrated with Facebook and/or Instagram.

Our Facebook integrations (which also includes Instagram) allows you to manage messages, comments, ad comments, and mentions as tickets in Gorgias. This gives your agents visibility into every conversation no matter where it happens, and empowers them to reply directly to shoppers without having to log into separate platforms or coordinate with your brand's social media team.

"The Gorgias-Facebook-Shopify integration is amazing. We've stopped hunting and matching Facebook users to customer accounts on Shopify. The information we need is surfaced so we can respond better and faster. Gorgias allows us to operate both ecommerce and social commerce business seamlessly." - Guita Gopalan, Chief Revenue Officer at Ellana

Read their story here.

Nervous about the quantity of tickets that would be created from integrating social channels with Gorgias? Don't be. You can use Rules to filter out comments your team doesn't need to worry about (like comments that only consist of emojis), or even auto-assign tickets to specify agents/teams so no one has to triage the requests.

4. SMS apps

Text message marketing has become an incredible revenue generator for ecommerce brands, but it also opens another new communication channel with your customers: SMS.

In order to make the most of SMS as a marketing tool, you also need to be ready to support it when customers reply back with questions. That's where Gorgias comes in; we integrate with SMS apps to help you connect your agents with shoppers sooner and collect all customer conversations in one place.

Over 23% of Gorgias customers are integrated with an SMS tool.

The top SMS apps connected to Gorgias are:

• Attentive, used by 10% of merchants
• Postscript, used by 8% of merchants
• SMS Bump, used by 5% of merchants

"Working with Postscript and Gorgias gave us the leverage to keep customers close to deliver the best possible customer experience. It is super helpful to have a full view of the customer, all in one-spot." -Eli Weiss, Director of CX at OLIPOP

Read their full story here.

5. Klaviyo

The next app on our list will help you collaborate with your marketing team to create a best-in-class shopper experience, whether they are interacting with the support team or receiving the latest promotion.

Klaviyo is an email and SMS marketing app for businesses that sell online. Our integration connects the two platforms, allowing you to use the data to create better campaigns.

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17% of Gorgias merchants are integrated with Klaviyo.

With this integration, you can push Gorgias events into Klaviyo for advances and customer-centric email segmenting.

For example, here are some of the ways we've seen customers use the two tools together:

• Promoting sales or new products to customers who had positive support experiences to drive upsell and revenue generation from support.
• Excluding customers with open support tickets from promotional messaging campaigns.
• Sending target coupons or discounts to win back customers who reported poor support experiences.

You can learn more about our Klaviyo integration or activate it here.

6. Recharge

The most common integration will help with subscription management, which is probably no surprise: Even with a great payment platform, subscription questions and transactions tend to result in a lot of support requests.

Recharge us a subscription and recurring payment platform for ecommerce sites, and helps you turn transactions into relationships.

15% of Gorgias merchants are integrated with Recharge.

Connect Gorgias and ReCharge for a simple way to manage customer subscriptions and customer service from one convenient location.

When you integrate Gorgias and Recharge, you can:

• Display ReCharge subscriptions next to support tickets in Gorgias, to gather full customer context before replying to questions.
• Cancel subscriptions, re-activate subscriptions, or refund a charge (either partially or totally) right from the Gorgias helpdesk.
• Embed ReCharge data in your Macro replies to automate the most common support questions.

Click here to learn more about our Recharge integration.

7. Phone, either our native solution or Aircall

It's clear that digital support is the first priority for most of our merchants, as seen by email, chat, and social media being the top three integrations on our list.

Sometimes it's nice to have a real conversation with your customers, however, which is why phone integrations are next.

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12% of merchants offer phone support.

Many use our Aircall integration, which is great if you need the advanced feature a dedicated tool like Aircall provides. If you're just adding phones for the first time, we released a native phone integration this year that's helping merchants begin to offer voice support.

8. Yotpo

Beyond answering customer questions, your support team may want to engage with reviews from shoppers in order to address issues, win back unhappy customers, and interact with your biggest fans!

Yotpo, a platform for ecommerce marketing and reviews, is great for this.

Over 8% of Gorgias merchants have activated our Yotpo integration.

The integration allows you to:

• Display customer's Yotpo data un Gorgias customer Activity Sidebar such as loyalty points, provided ratings, latest reviews, etc.
• Manage customer loyalty plans (change point balance, assign VIP tier, honor redemptions, and send rewards) from the Gorgias sidebar.
• Respond to a question with an answer either publicly or privately as new tickets.
• Moderate customer reviews (product and site) and questions from within Gorgias as new tickets.
• Request reviews from a customer.

Click here to learn more about our Yotpo integration and activate it.

9. Smile

No one knows your shoppers quite like your support team, which makes an integration with a loyalty app a natural fit! Smile.io is a favorite of Gorgias merchants, which helps you manage a reward program and build strong relationships with your newest and most loyal customers.

6% of Gorgias merchants integrate with Smile.io.

With this integration, you'll be able to see customer loyalty information right next to tickets in Gorgias, so every agent knows when they are talking to a new customer or one of your VIPs! You can also use this information to help triage tickets or separate ticket views by loyalty status (which is great for managing different levels of support SLAs).

To learn more about our integration with Smile.io and activate it for your account, click here.

10. ChannelReply

If your shop sells on public marketplaces beyond your own Shopify store, the final app on our list is a must. ChannelReply helps you manage messages from Amazon, eBay, and Walmart.

With our integration, you can then manage all those messages right from your helpdesk, eliminating the need for your agents to open different browser tabs for each platform.

Over 5% of Gorgias merchants use the ChannelReply integrations.

To learn more about ChannelReply and activate the integration for your account, click here.

And there you have it: The top 10 integrations with Gorgias in 2021! We hope this helps inspire you how you can use your helpdesk to offer exceptional, conceptual support and how to streamline the tools your store uses everyday to grow your business.

To get more ecommerce tool suggestions, check out our list of 150+ great tools. And to view all integrations with our platform, visit the Gorgias App Store.

In 2019, Amazon Prime broke records, delivering a bottle of Oyster Bay Sauvignon Blanc in just 13 minutes. But what was a novel example of ultra-fast fulfillment is quickly heading towards normality, as customer expectations rise beyond the buy button and beyond Amazon.

Only a third of customers will wait three or more days for an online delivery, and one in four shoppers will choose a retailer because they have better delivery options than their competitors. In other words, fast fulfillment is the new eCommerce standard for 2021. 

But you don’t want your eCommerce brand to be standard; you want it to be exceptional, and this is where ultra-fast fulfillment comes in. 

This blog will go over ultra-fast deliveries and how to get them for your eCommerce store. 

What is ultra-fast fulfillment?

Ultra-fast fulfillment is an eCommerce delivery standard that beats standard fulfillment speeds by delivering orders in 3, 2, and even next day.

The actual date of ultra-fast delivery depends on the customer location and your fulfillment partner’s order cut-off time. For example, a customer living 3 kilometers from your warehouse, placing an order at 10 a.m. on a Monday, could receive their order the same or next day. A customer living 4,000 kilometers from your warehouse placing an ordering at 5 p.m. on Monday would receive their order later.

To make this possible, eCommerce sellers can use a combination of distributed warehouses, an array of carriers and overnight shipping services, or leave it to an all-inclusive outsourced fulfillment provider. 

First, let’s look at why ultra-fast delivery is critical for eCommerce success this year.  

8 reasons ultra-fast fulfillment is critical for 2021

Ultra-fast delivery isn’t anything new; as you heard, Amazon has been delivering items super quick for years. But events in 2020 have made ultra-fast fulfillment crucial for eCommerce success in 2021, for several reasons. 

1. Providing ultra-fast fulfillment as your eCommerce differentiator

eCommerce is becoming an increasingly noisy industry, with more people selling online than ever before. 

Last year, we witnessed the shift from physical to online retail accelerate by approximately five years. eCommerce is booming, and so is the competition. Accordingly, you need a sustainable differentiator to stand out;- something that can set you apart without significantly diminishing your profits, as price wars can do. 

Ultra-fast fulfillment is your eCommerce differentiator. It’s dynamic, specific, and convenient -- providing customers with something valuable, personalized, and noticeable to distinguish you from your competitors. 

Shoppers also like talking about and listening to positive delivery experiences -- allowing you to further differentiate your customers using positive user-generated content and feedback to secure more conversions.

Relevant reading: How fast delivery can help your Shopify store stand out

2. Winning customers from Amazon

Amazon ships fast, and shoppers know that - it’s why 63% of consumers head straight there. However, 2020 caused a change in shopper behavior, with more consumers wanting to shop directly with brands rather than via an online marketplace. 

According to RetailDive back in 2018, 81% of consumers planned to shop directly by 2023 - and with Amazon Prime suffering notable outages last year, we expect this statistic to be achieved earlier than expected. 

Ultra-fast fulfillment provides shoppers with the convenience of Amazon’s shipping speeds with the personal and rewarding experience of shopping directly with online brands. It allows you to offer the best of both worlds and benefit from Amazon’s disloyal customer base. 

3. Increasing your visibility online

To stand out, you must be seen, and ultra-fast shipping speeds help with that too. 

If you’re a multi-channel seller, fast shipping programs such as Walmart TwoDay and Wish 2-day increase your visibility with search rankings, fast shipping tags, fast shipping-filters, and buy box preference. This, in turn, boosts your website traffic, as people learn about your brand and google you to find out more.

You can also increase the visibility of your website among paid advertisements. Dynamic, fast shipping ad tags display 2-day or next-day delivery tags on your Facebook and Google Shopping advertisements, depending on the customer’s location. This makes your ads visually stand out to attract customer attention.

4. Providing Insta-gratification

May 2020 saw Instagram Shops hit the eCommerce scene, bringing a whole new level of instant gratification. 

Shoppers use Instagram to seamlessly browse products and place orders without leaving the platform - increasing the speed they can purchase. 

Ultra-fast fulfillment ensures you don’t ruin an Insta-worthy customer experience by slow deliveries. Instead, customers receive their product while they’re still excited and engaged, making them more likely to share their buying experience on the platform.

5. Providing more control to your buyers

Buying products online can be unpredictable. Customers don’t know if the product quality will match expectations, when the order will arrive, or if it will arrive at all. This makes shopping online stressful for many, and the panic buying of 2020 only made things worse. 

Ultra-fast shipping comforts customers and provides reassurance and convenience in an unpredictable world. Customers know when their order will arrive, meaning they spend very little time in that gray area between order placement and receipt. 

Let’s also not forget that sometimes shoppers have no control over how quickly they need an item - think forgotten anniversary gifts or empty beauty products. Ultra-fast shipping allows customers to regain control over the situation by rectifying it as soon as possible.

6. Meeting the emotional needs of shoppers

Customers have certain emotional needs you need to meet when selling online, and that’s gotten even more prominent over the past 12 months. 

2-day and next-day delivery speeds cater to these emotional needs in four different ways:

• Providing easy-to-understand shipping expectations that reduce ambiguity and increase certainty. 
• Delivering products as soon as possible to provide instant gratification and remove worry. 
• Highlighting exceptional customer care to increase trust. 
• Providing strong customer service to support the customer through their purchasing journey. 
  

Ultimately, fast shipping excites customers during the purchasing phase, supports them during the delivery phase, and pleases them during the receipt phase. 

7. Creating business resilience during growth periods

eCommerce has been running at a peak since the middle of last year, creating certain industry strains. 

Amazon FBA couldn’t keep up with the demand, resulting in the suspension of non-essential inbound deliveries and slow delivery speeds - while other sellers faced broken supply chains, insatiable demand, and overwhelmed shipping carriers. 

Successful brands were those that could rely on a strong and fast fulfillment infrastructure to maintain delivery speeds and meet the demand of their customers.

8. Reducing strain on your customer service

Customer relations are integral to your store’s success and reputation, necessitating fast, easy, and helpful customer support. 

Ultra-fast fulfillment helps your customer service team reduce the number of “where is my order?” queries, by removing uncertainty and delivering before frustration sets in. 

This gives your customer service team more time to handle other customer matters, initiate proactive customer support, and nail your customer service in 2021. 

How to attain ultra-fast fulfillment speeds

Perhaps the biggest question in your mind isn’t the benefits of ultra-fast deliveries, but the practicalities of them. How do you match the speeds of Amazon Prime to provide next-day and 2-day deliveries on your Shopify store or other eCommerce platform?

Distribute inventory across the country

The first step in attaining ultra-fast fulfillment is distributing your SKUs across the country. The closer your inventory sits to the end customer, the less time it takes to get to their front door.

This enables you to increase delivery speed - providing 2-day deliveries across the country and next-day deliveries to customers living within a certain radius of your warehouses. And the less distance orders must travel, the less money you spend on shipping costs. 

For example, Deliverr strategically distributes inventory across the country based on historical demand. That means we predict where your most demand will be, and preemptively store SKUs near buyers. 

Optimize internal fulfillment processes

The less time it takes between receiving an order and handing that order to your shipping carrier, the more time your shipping carrier has to deliver an order expeditiously. 

If you fulfill orders in-house, optimize your internal fulfillment processes to minimize order handling time by:

• Using real-time order management software to download new orders and print shipping labels upon receipt. 
• Adapting your warehouse layout to mimic your order fulfillment workflow (for example, order download station > fast-moving stock > packaging station > warehouse door). 
• Using temporary staff during peak retail periods such as the holidays or ‘Back to School.’ 

Package orders properly

A lost, damaged, or incorrectly delivered package is a surefire way to downgrade your delivery service from ultra-fast to ultra-slow. 

Reduce the chances of this happening to your order by securely packaging orders using the right materials, eCommerce dunnage, shipping labels, and traceable shipping service. 

Tip: If you’re outsourcing, send your items into your fulfillment center as you want your customers to receive it.

Partner with an outsourced eCommerce fulfillment service

If you don’t have the time, space, or expertise to achieve ultra-fast fulfillment yourself, it’s time to switch from in-house to outsourced fulfillment.

An ultra-fast fulfillment service like Deliverr is optimized for 2-day and next-day deliveries, using:

• A network of warehouses across the country
• Intelligent stock distribution software
• Scalable storage and staff to manage peak periods
• Fast-shipping designed processes and practices
  

You simply distribute your stock according to their instruction, and they do the storing, picking, packing, shipping, and everything in between.

Outsourcing your fulfillment doesn’t have to cost more either. The buying power of third-party fulfillment services often results in better bulk rates, and Deliverr provides an all-inclusive fulfillment cost that makes ultra-fast deliveries more affordable for your business.

How to promote ultra-fast fulfillment speeds

Before we leave you to get started and reap the benefits of ultra-fast fulfillment in your eCommerce business, lets cover the best ways to promote those shipping speeds to your customers. 

When you’ve gone to the time and trouble of achieving 2-day and next-day delivery, you want to share them in as many places as possible.

Get on marketplace fast shipping programs

Many marketplaces will take care of highlighting your fast shipping offerings for you. For example, Walmart has Walmart TwoDay Delivery, eBay has eBay Fast ‘N Free, Wish has Wish 2-day, and Amazon has Amazon Prime.

Fast shipping tags and banners

Add branded fast shipping tags to your listings, making it one of the first things customers notice when clicking through to a product page. You can also add fast shipping banners on your home and category pages to reinforce the message and appeal to all customers - regardless of how urgent their purchase is.

Fast shipping countdown timers

Use a fast shipping countdown timer on product pages to tell customers exactly how long they have left to order their product in time for 2-day or next-day delivery. Not only does a fast shipping countdown timer create certainty, but it also creates a sense of urgency that pushes many customers over the conversion line. 

Dynamic fast shipping ad tags

Add dynamic fast shipping tags to your online advertisements that use a customer’s current location to display next-day or 2-day delivery tags as appropriate. These set realistic customer expectations while making your ad stand out among others. 

Your customer service and marketing teams

Get your customer service and marketing teams talking about and using your ultra-fast delivery speeds when dealing with customers. For example, your customer service agents can provide free ultra-fast delivery for replacement products or as a gesture of goodwill. At the same time, your marketing team can share ultra-fast delivery feedback on your social media accounts. 

Wrapping it all up

Fast shipping has been getting faster for a long time now, but 2021 is the year where ultra-fast fulfillment becomes critical to business success. 

Delivery speeds of 2-day, next-day, and same-day shipping have the power to:

• Distinguish your store
• Win customers
• Increase online visibility
• Satisfy customer needs
• Increase business resilience
• Reduce strain on your customer service team 
  

Together, these benefits propel your eCommerce business forward to scale great heights. And, with ultra-fast fulfillment services that can handle allocating, storing, packing, and shipping for you, there is no excuse not to get started

Great news! Today, we're announcing a new integration with LoyaltyLion. LoyaltyLion is a digital loyalty framework that gives ecommerce stores innovative ways to engage and retain customers.

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Our mutual customer Darn Good Yarn uses it to successfully increase customer retention. When they switched from Freshdesk to Gorgias to manage customer support, they wanted to leverage their loyalty program for customer support.

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We used their feedback to build the integration with LoyaltyLion, which they have been using for a couple months in beta. Today, we're excited to make it available to all our users.

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What is the LoyaltyLion integration?

Here are some of the benefits of this integration:

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• Display how many points a customer has when they contact your support team
• When you respond to customer support requests, award loyalty points to customers directly in Gorgias
• Include the customer's personal referral url in your responses. This way, if they are happy about your support, they'll refer their friends to your store.

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Overall, this allows your team to use your loyalty program for customer service.

"We love being able to issue our customers loyalty points directly from Gorgias! It's a great way to boost efficiency and also customer retention."

Chloe Kesler, Customer Support manager at Darn Good Yarn

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How can I use the LoyaltyLion Integration?

The integration is immediately available on your Gorgias account. If you don't have an account, you can create one here. Then, follow the instructions in our documentation and you can get started!

Maximizing peak season sales isn’t only about driving customers to your website. If website visitors people encounter a slow, unhelpful, or lackluster customer experience, they’ll click away before buying — flushing away all your marketing efforts and dollars.

In a recent webinar, Caela Castillo, Director of Customer Experience at luxury men’s jewelry brand Jaxxon, shared Jaxxon’s strategies for optimizing customer experience to maximize revenue during peak season. 

We’ll start with some of the most concrete strategies Jaxxon leverages, and wrap up with some bigger-picture insights on how Caela manages the team. 

You can also hear Caela share these tips herself by watching the webinar here.

How Jaxxon manages ticket spikes during peak season

Last year, Jaxxon had what Caela describes as a very successful but challenging peak season, when customer support tickets skyrocketed to three times normal levels. As a result, Jaxxon has stepped up its approach to optimizing customer support for efficiency and self-service during the 2022 peak season.

Here are the tactics and tools Jaxxons used to manage ticket spikes this year:

Provide self-service answers to FAQ in live chat

Jaxxon uses Gorgias Quick Response Flows to answer frequently asked questions during peak season. Caela and her team customize the questions and answers so that customers can get an instant response to common queries.

“We really noticed that adding automated self-service with Gorgias took part of the load off us. A lot of customers’ questions are answered by self-service, so then they’re happy and we don’t have to do anything further with those tickets,” Caela says. 

Automating these responses has two-fold benefits:

1. Customers get instant answers to questions — no wait time required
2. Agents actually have time for conversations that need a human touch

“If the customer has additional questions, then our agents have the time to have an authentic conversation with them, and give them a really great experience.”

Regularly review tickets to monitor performance and spot emerging issues

Caela regularly reviews recent customer conversations to monitor individual agent performance and identify areas for improvement or lessons learned. Using Gorgias tags — automatically applied to customer tickets for categorization and filtering — Caela can also get a sense for the most common customer questions and issues.

“If we're noticing a trend with a certain issue, then we want to solve it right away rather than figure it out weeks from now when it’s a bigger issue,” Caela explains. “So we don't want to only review tickets once a month. We want to do it in real time.”

The real opportunity for peak seasons is turning first-time customers into repeat shoppers

Jaxxon realizes that any peak season is a starting line, not a finish line. Providing an awesome first customer experience doesn’t just net a sale. It nurtures longterm relationships and turns happy customers into loyal brand advocates.

“We want to make sure that first shopping experience is really great — everything from the customer support to the shipping to the box it arrives in — so they want to come back and buy again. We listen to our customer reviews and we really want to help people have a great experience.”

Jaxxon invests in ongoing training and support to ensure its customer service agents have the knowledge, skills, and tools they need to do their job confidently and effectively.

“Sometimes customers are a little hesitant about buying something as expensive as solid gold online. And our agents can explain to them the difference between our products, or suggest an upgrade, or say, hey, would you like this bracelet to go with the Cuban link chain you bought last time?” says Caela. 

“For our agents to be able to upsell and cross-sell like that is super important for us — and it works.”

Quick Response Flows help Jaxxon open the door to some of these conversions. Providing quick, helpful answers about product restocks, sizing, shipping and more, lays a positive foundation that human agents can easily build on.

How Jaxxon sustains the team during peak seasons

One of the biggest challenges during any peak season is thinking ahead so that your team — not just your customers — succeed.

Plan ahead when it comes to coverage

First off, make sure you have enough customer service agents in place to cope with soaring demand. Jaxxon has increased its customer support team for this year’s peak season. 

Caela uses a zoning plan to stagger agents’ shifts across different time zones and locations, so there is always enough coverage for Jaxxon’s 24/7 customer support. She adapts this as peak season unfolds to meet shifting demand.

“Having open communication is essential. We always say there are no stupid questions. We’re here to help each other. Even though we work remotely, we're still able to communicate really well and work as a team.

Once the team is in place, get them ready. “Training your team is really important, and making sure they have the resources and support they need,” Caela says.

📚 Related reading: How to stand out during Black Friday with 18 marketing strategies

Maintain staff morale during crunch time

“Keeping morale high is so important for peak season, because it’s a busy time in life, not just at work,” Caela says. This is a unique situation in ecommerce — did anyone else have a turkey in the oven while answering support tickets during BFCM?

“Everyone gets stressed; sometimes people get sick. It's hard to sustain motivation sometimes. So we want to make sure everyone's really taken care of and set up for success. And we try to make it fun for the team.” 

A culture of mutual support among the Jaxxon customer service team is reinforced by team-based incentives to win gift cards, jewelry and more when certain targets are met.

“A positive attitude goes a long way to keeping people motivated. You get so much farther if you're kind and positive. And I’m very big on looking at difficult situations as learning experiences. And if someone is struggling, other team members will help them so we all rise together.” 

📚 Related reading: How Jaxxon offers motivates agents with rotating customer support incentives.

Lean on tools and systems to manage high demand

Having the right systems in place to manage customer support more efficiently is important at any time of year. But it has the biggest impact during peak periods when demand balloons. 

“You have to prepare for the worst, in terms of very high demand. Things just get crazier as peak season progresses! So make sure to have your self-service and automation set up and ready to go,” says Caela. “After last year’s challenges, we've made sure to have stronger systems in place this year.”

Jaxxon now uses Gorgias to manage all customer conversations. This helps the team work more efficiently in several ways:

• Seeing all customer conversations across different channels in one place, to avoid tab-shuffling and duplicated responses
• Filtering and sorting tickets, for easier prioritization
• Deflecting some questions to automated self-service, to free up customer service agents’ time for more complex customer conversations
• Bringing together all of a customer’s information, to enable more personalized service

Implementing self-service chat has cut Jaxxon’s live chat volume by 17%, yet increased conversions by 6%. Meanwhile, revenue generated by chat has shot up by an impressive 46%. The overall impact has been positive for customer experience and Jaxxon’s bottom line.

Read more about how Jaxxon uses Gorgias to speed up response times without sacrificing the quality of customer service.

Customer experience is vital to maximize peak season sales

By assembling a larger, well-trained customer service team and putting the right tools in place, Jaxxon is poised to continue delivering high-quality customer service this peak season — even when ticket volumes triple. Caela and her team are excited to dive into the peak season. With Gorgias by their side, they are ready to ride out whatever challenges come their way.

To hear the full story of Caela’s tips, lessons learned, and Jaxxon’s preparations for peak seasons, watch the webinar replay.

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Today, we’re thrilled to announce that we’ve raised a $1.5 million Seed round led by Charles River Ventures and Amplify Partners, to help build our new helpdesk.

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We’re incredibly grateful to early users, customers, mentors we’ve met both at and Techstars.

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We started the journey with Alex at the beginning of 2015 with our Chrome extension, which helps write email faster using templates. We’ve been pleased all along with customers telling us about how helpful it was, especially for customer support.

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While building the extension, we’ve realized that a big inefficiency in support lies in the lack of integration between the helpdesk, the payment system, CRM and other tools support is using. As a result, agents need to do a lot of repetitive work to respond to customer requests, especially when the company is big.

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That’s why we’ve decided to build a new kind of helpdesk to enable customer support agents to respond 2x faster to customers. You can find out more and sign up for our private beta here.

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When a company has a lot of customers, support becomes repetitive. We want to provide support teams with tools to automate the way they treat simple repetitive requests. This way, they have more time for complex customer issues.

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We'll now focus on this helpdesk and on growing the team, oh, and if you'd like to join, we're hiring! We're super excited about this new helpdesk product. If you’re using the extension, don’t worry.

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Romain & Alex

Today, we’re thrilled to announce we’re joining the Shopify Plus Technology partner program.

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Over the past few months, we’ve worked with some incredible Shopify Plus merchants like Darn Good Yarn, Fjallraven and Frichti, who serve tens of thousands of customers every month. What they all had in common was a shared commitment to maximizing the efficiency of the customer service team to keep delivering high-quality support as they grow.

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We’ve worked with other technology partners, like LoyaltyLion, in order to provide merchants with a holistic view of their customers when they respond to them in an effort to continue delivering best-in-class support interactions. We’ve also worked with the Plus team to leverage the latest features of the Shopify Plus API, to allow agents to create customized solutions for their customers, For example, creating personalized gift cards based on support conversations. Also, check out the guide we wrote comparing Shopify and Shopify Plus for an idea of the additional functionality and benefits ecommerce business owners get when they upgrade to Shopify Plus.

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Using our technology, we’re proud to announce that our Shopify Plus customers have managed to improve their support request treatment time by 30%.

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By joining the Technology Partner Program, we’re excited to take our collaboration with Shopify Plus and Shopify Plus merchants to the next level, by further enabling more customers to improve their customer service.

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"We are glad to welcome Gorgias to the Shopify Plus Technology Partner Program. We’re particularly excited about how they’re helping our merchants provide efficient & personalized customer support, and hope they can help more of them."

Jamie Sutton, Head of Technology Partnerships, Shopify Plus