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TL;DR:

• Gorgias views AI as an extension of CX teams, treating it like a human support agent by Onboarding it with your policies, Automating ticket handling, Observing its response quality, and Coaching it with continuous feedback.
• AI Agent uses a combination of GPT-4o, brand-owned data, and third-party integrations like Shopify to provide accurate responses while limiting hallucinations.
• AI Agent can fully resolve requests and perform actions to improve first response and resolution times without sacrificing support quality.
• Human feedback continuously refines AI Agent performance to keep it effective and on-brand.

Chances are, you’ve had at least one frustrating experience with AI in customer support. Even with 69.2% of customer support professionals using AI, you’re still skeptical about making AI a permanent part of your customer support operations.

At Gorgias, building AI has been a thoughtful process. We insist on only shipping AI features that improve customer experiences, not degrade them. 

To help you understand how we’re approaching AI, we’ll walk through the four pillars that ensure a positive AI experience for you and your customers: Onboard, Automate, Observe, and Coach.

• Onboard: Teach the AI your processes and brand voice.
• Automate: Let the AI start handling tickets in your inbox.
• Observe: Keep a close eye on the quality of the AI’s response.
• Coach: Give feedback to continually improve the AI’s accuracy.

Putting it all together: we view AI as the ultimate assistive tool for customer experience (CX) teams.

AI changes the way CX teams operate

Before diving into the four pillars, let’s set the stage. Two major changes have occurred in the past few years:

1. Customer expectations for instant answers across channels are growing.
2. We have the technology to answer hundreds of tickets simultaneously, each in <1 minute — without breaking the budget on uncapped hiring.

As AI removes the grunt work from support teams’ plates, repetitive tasks such as providing order status updates, processing returns, and answering frequently asked questions can be offloaded to AI.

AI can even handle the mental work of reading, summarizing, categorizing, prioritizing, and tagging, even when a human needs to step in.

Agents can then focus on higher-impact tasks, like speaking to VIP customers on the phone, offering new support channels, driving upsells and cross-sells, and much more. This is how CX teams evolve. 

Brands using Gorgias’s AI Agent in the alpha testing phase are already automating as much as 30% of email tickets. By the end of 2024, we envision over half of brands’ customer tickets to be handled by AI Agent.

The 4 pillars of AI at Gorgias

Our overall goal is to make CX tools, including AI, that are great for customers and their overall business goals. We follow four pillars when it comes to AI at Gorgias.

Onboard: Teach the AI your processes and brand voice

Bringing AI into your support team is like onboarding a new agent. Like any agent, AI should know:

• How to talk like your brand, using brand-specific voice and language
• Your policy, products, and FAQs
• How your helpdesk processes work, i.e. tagging tickets for organization
• Which topics should be handed over to a superior (in the case of AI, a human)

AI should model the most efficient support reps who know their brand inside and out — while being able to empathize with customers at lightning speed. That is the future of great customer service. 

How it looks in Gorgias

AI Agent’s main knowledge reference is your owned data, including your Shopify storefront and backend, Help Center articles, order data, brand voice, conversation history, and other URLs where your brand content is stored. 

When adding AI Agent to your Gorgias account, you can sync each of these resources to empower your AI Agent with the knowledge it needs to answer questions and resolve basic issues. 

To enhance AI Agent’s answering power, the Guidance feature allows you to provide detailed instructions on how AI Agent should interact with customers. 

While the prior resources are centered around brand knowledge, Guidance is more like team processes. You can instruct AI Agent to ask follow-up questions, confirm details, and treat customers one way or another depending on factors like whether:

• Their order was placed within the last XX days
• They have spent more than $XX with your brand
• They are domestic or international customers
• And so much more

Tosha Moyer, Senior Customer Experience Manager at menswear brand Psycho Bunny, highlights the value of our internal guidance feature. “The internal guidance feature is so important because we have a lot of internal processes that we do not need to be described in a customer-facing article, but we want AI Agent to be able to access that information and manage tickets accordingly.”

Last, you can instruct AI to speak in your brand’s voice. When setting up AI Agent, you can provide your team’s tone of voice guidelines, brand bible, and other resources to ensure your agent represents your brand identity. 

Automate: Let the AI start handling tickets in your inbox

AI can do so much more than restate your brand policies. At Gorgias, we believe AI should fully resolve inquiries — and that means taking action.

According to a report by Gartner, 82% of customers say quick resolutions influence their decision to stay loyal to a brand. When we empower AI to take action, customers have better experiences and are more likely to keep doing business with a brand.

How it looks in Gorgias

AI Agent uses the latest model of ChatGPT, 4o, combined with the content you already have to send human-like answers to customers.

But AI Agent doesn’t only regurgitate your Help Center content. It goes one step further by updating customers’ orders, changing addresses, sending order and return statuses, and more.

Native integrations with Shopify and other apps in the Gorgias ecosystem allow AI Agent to fully resolve basic inquiries by pulling customer-specific data and performing actions in other tools. 

Our goal is to make connecting these tools as simple as possible, minimizing the need for technical setups like configuring API calls. 

Of course, AI’s decisions on when to execute these Actions should come from your team. That’s why you can set up conditions for each Action, specifying when (and for whom) the Action can fire.

AI Agent includes a variety of pre-built Actions from popular ecommerce apps like Shopify, Recharge, and Loop Returns — with many more on the way. You can also build Custom Actions with any 3rd-party tool. 

Within two months, AI Agent outranked Psycho Bunny’s human agents’ resolution times. It resolved tickets in under 2 minutes, compared to the human average of 4+ hours. Customers even gave AI Agent a 4.67/5 CSAT score —  nearly 0.1 points higher than human agents’ average CSAT score.

Observe: Keep a close eye on the quality of the AI’s response

AI is a new technology — we humans are still building trust and comfort. In fact, only 3 in 10 Americans are able to identify AI use in digital use cases, according to the Pew Research Center. This suggests a lack of transparency in how companies use AI.

In a problem-solving service like customer support, AI’s role and decision-making should be transparent: Agents should know which tickets are handled by AI, what exactly the AI did, and why. 

How it looks in Gorgias

Agents can see the logic of AI Agent right in the ticket view.  This includes the knowledge source it used, the specific actions it took, and the exact responses it generated. All actions made by AI Agent are highlighted in purple or symbolized by the purple sparkle AI Agent icon.

Being able to discern AI responses from human ones allows brands to: 

• Ensure the accuracy of AI responses to provide speedy resolutions.
• Quickly correct AI missteps to maintain high standards of service.
• Build customer trust by being transparent about AI’s role in the customer support process.

We highly recommend nominating one human agent to review AI Agent’s responses. Set aside time each week to review to understand how it behaves, when it responds vs hands over, and the most common knowledge resources it pulls from.

Coach: Give feedback to continually improve the AI’s accuracy

Inevitably, AI won’t be perfect from day 1. Just like a new agent, AI needs coaching. That’s why the final pillar of our AI philosophy is improving AI’s knowledge and performance through coaching. 

When AI makes a mistake, you should have the power to correct it so that future errors are avoided. When AI acts correctly, you should also be able to encourage and reinforce its positive behavior. 

A continuous cycle of coaching helps AI become more aligned with your brand’s standards.

How it looks in Gorgias

Feedback is built into AI Agent. Every decision AI Agent makes can be rated with a thumbs-up/down system. Encourage AI Agent to continue making the same actions with a thumbs up, and change behavior with a thumbs down. 

You can see how AI handles every situation in detail, giving you full transparency. Reviewing these decisions leads AI to better align with your brand’s standards.

In addition, you can easily instruct AI Agent to pull from different Guidance instructions and Help Center articles or execute different Actions — with the easy ability to create or edit those resources in just a few clicks.

Empower your team with AI

At Gorgias, we designed AI to enhance your customer support experience. By leveraging the pillars of Onboard, Automate, Observe, and Coach, we ensure that AI Agent is an effective and reliable partner for your team.

With AI handling low-priority repetitive questions, your team can focus on creating more meaningful connections. This includes prioritizing VIP customers and escalated tickets, upselling, and engaging in higher-impact activities.

The future of AI at Gorgias is bright, with continuous improvements and new features on the horizon. Embrace the power of AI and see how it can transform your customer service team.

Book a demo today to experience the benefits of AI Agent for yourself.

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• Create personalized onsite campaigns to enhance the shopping experience.
• Activate exit-intent campaigns to reduce cart abandonment.
• Implement upselling strategies to increase average order values.
• Offer product education to boost customer confidence and purchases.

At this point, you’re already well aware that CX is now proving itself to be an invaluable acquisition tool — not just a retention lever.

But to drive the hammer home, we looked into our database to see how CX-focused strategies like onsite campaigns enhance the customer journey and drive substantial increases in sales and conversion rates, specifically with Gorgias Convert.

Using these well-curated campaigns, businesses like Manduka have witnessed a remarkable increase in revenue — approximately $130,000. 

We’ll show you how you can achieve similar results and why it’s a crucial marketing strategy — just as important as paid and email marketing.

Ways to use onsite campaigns for sales without disrupting the shopping experience

Gorgias Convert is an onsite revenue generation tool that helps ecommerce brands boost their conversions by over 6% — and it isn’t your typical intrusive pop-up. This feature seamlessly integrates with your website, recommending products to shoppers in a subtle but still captivating way.

Targeting customer segments based on their browsing behaviors, Convert makes timely and relevant suggestions via chat.

Here are a few ways you can use it:

Create fluid shopping experiences that reduce acquisition costs

Imagine this: someone clicks on your social media ad for acne removal solutions, lands on your site, and isn’t just greeted with a standard product page but accompanied by a personalized message that offers valuable product education.

In fact, Gorgias users see that we typically generate $20 for every $1 spent. So think of onsite campaigns as a way to make your ad dollars work harder with a more personalized experience by:

• Mirroring the language and tone of your ads within your onsite campaigns creates a familiar and comforting environment for your visitors. 
• Populating welcome campaigns that kick in when a shopper lands on your site so that every new customer engagement starts with meaningful dialogue geared toward turning curiosity into sales.

Here’s a fun example from TUSHY, the modern bidet company. 

When customers visit a bidet page, they receive a message from TUSHY’s support team, letting them know about their toilet compatibility page to help them select the right bidet:

Personalize cross-sell and upsell messages on specific product pages

Here’s something many brands get wrong about ecommerce upselling: It’s not about pushing the most expensive items; it’s about showing customers the value of an upgrade that’s complementary to the problems they’re already trying to solve.

As your customers shop, Gorgias Convert suggests complementary items. It’s like when you’re in a store and an associate suggests a tie to match the shirt you’re buying.

Manduka uses these campaigns brilliantly. Targeting shoppers nearing the free shipping threshold, they suggest just the right little extras to tip the scales. 

This makes it quick and easy for customers to top up their orders with relevant products.

The results? 

• Total Campaign revenue: $11,788.91
• Impressions: 37,586
• Mobile Clicks Conversion Rate: 19.65%
• Desktop Clicks Conversion Rate: 12.06%

Jessica Botello, the Customer Service Manager at Manduka, explains why this campaign works so well: 

“People want free shipping. So if they've already got over $75 worth in their cart, they're almost there. Then we pop up and suggest: check out these items. It’s a curated list of the easy little add-ons that you'll need anyway for your yoga practice, but will also take you over the free shipping threshold,” she explains. “What's really helpful is that it pops up, rather than the customer having to go through the menu and look for things.” 

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Winback browsers with exit-intent campaigns

You’ve likely tried exit-intent pop-ups before. You know, those pop-ups that trigger when a customer indicates they’re about to abandon their cart or browsing session. 

As more brands adopt these pop-ups, customers are becoming more accustomed to them. But what’s less obtrusive is a personalized message directly from your team.

There are many ways you can grab your customers' attention with these messages. Maybe it's offering a little nudge with a timely discount, waiving that shipping fee, or answering a last-minute question they had about the product.

Here, let’s look at two examples of how effective these campaigns can be.

Manduka’s exit-intent messages

Manduka uses these exit-intent messages to offer $20 on orders over $100 (a strategic way to not only reduce cart abandonment but also increase AOV and email subscribers simultaneously.) 

By engaging visitors with personalized, timely messages right when they’re about to leave, Gorgias Convert helps transform potential bounces into real conversions.

You can read more about how Manduka set up these campaigns with Gorgias Convert here.

Glamnetic’s approach

Glamnetic has had particular success with an exit intent campaign offering a discount for new customers, new product promotions, and educational campaigns. 

Its most successful campaign offers a sweet 15% discount and boasts an on-ticket conversion rate of 18.39%. 

Here’s how it works:

• Using Gorgias Convert, Glamnetic detects when the mouse hovers near the top of the browser, a telltale sign of an impending exit.
• The same 15% discount available through newsletter or SMS sign-ups is now presented via live chat. It’s straightforward, no strings attached. 
• The campaign targets visitors who’ve been to the site three times or fewer and linger for at least 15 seconds. This specificity ensures the message is relevant and timely.

You can peek at the campaign setup below. It runs 24/7, ready at any moment to engage: 

Strategically highlight new product launches

Countless new products pop up every day; consumers are bombarded with options. The challenge for brands is to launch new products in a visible and desirable way. 

As you’re well aware, that’s tougher than it sounds amidst all the noise consumers already experience daily.

This is where Gorgias Convert stands out and is different from the other pop-up tools.

Unlike your latest TikTok and Instagram ads, these onsite campaigns feel genuine because a friendly support agent makes the recommendation without disrupting the shopping experience.

For example, when Glamnetic unveiled its vibrant Rainbow collection in May 2023, the team deployed targeted, visually appealing onsite campaigns that immediately drew visitors’ eyes to the new products.

Directly on the homepage, visitors were greeted with eye-catching product images from live chat, featuring a seamless and effortless option to add new items to their cart.

Mia, Head of Customer Experience at Glamnetic, shares the strategy behind the success: “The aim was to elevate the visibility of new releases without requiring customers to hunt for them. Our onsite campaigns proactively present our latest products through compelling visuals and straightforward navigation, simplifying the decision-making process for the buyer.”

That’s why Glamnetic prominently placed top-selling items in the product carousel, directly in the live chat box. The products were impossible to ignore, leading to a 49% sales increase for featured items.

Help customers be successful with product education

Product education is a powerful sales and retention tactic. By building trust with customers right away, they’ll feel more confident purchasing your products because they know they will use them successfully. 

Manduka uses onsite campaigns to educate potential customers. Triggered when visitors spend more than 15 seconds on the yoga props page, the campaigns guide customers through their yoga journey and help them choose the perfect props for their practice.

Jessica Botello, Customer Service Manager at Manduka, highlights the campaign's impact: 

“This yoga props blog suggestion campaign is really great because we have several options, and that can feel confusing to someone who doesn’t know which one to get because they are new to yoga and aren't familiar with which props would benefit them. The blog explains in more detail how to use the different props in your yoga practice, and the different benefits of a round bolster vs a rectangular bolster. So it helps people go ahead and choose the right product for them.”

In other words, simply explaining the nuances between choices like a round versus a rectangular bolster helped customers feel more confident about the products they purchased. 

And the proof is in the pudding. Between April–August 2023, this campaign achieved the following:

• Total Campaign revenue: $3,851.73
• Impressions: 6,310
• Clicks Conversion Rate: 11.5%

By proactively addressing potential questions and concerns, Manduka enhances the shopping experience, leading to higher satisfaction and fewer post-purchase issues.

Promote sales with holiday campaigns 

Holidays aren't just for festivities — they're prime opportunities for brands to connect with customers in fun, thematic ways. 

Take TUSHY, for example. To celebrate US Independence Day, TUSHY ran a cheekily-themed on-site campaign called "USofSPRAY," offering a patriotic 25% off all bidets.

Yes, you read that right — cleaning your bum has never been more patriotic!

Why it works: TUSHY’s approach to holiday promotions is smart and spirited. By aligning their campaign with a major holiday, they tapped into the celebratory mood of their customers, making it not just about a discount but about being part of a nationwide celebration. This not only makes the promotion more memorable but also more engaging.

The USofSPRAY campaign not only captured attention but also captured significant sales:

• Influence on store revenue: A staggering 47.9% of the store's revenue during this period was influenced by the campaign.
• Click-through rate (CTR): The campaign achieved a healthy 3.5% CTR, indicating strong interest and engagement.
• Impressions: It racked up 65,000 impressions, spreading the word far and wide about the benefits of a cleaner, fresher bathroom experience.
• Conversion rate: Impressively, 76% of customers who engaged with the campaign went on to make a purchase.

4 tips to create a well-thought-out onsite campaign

Investing time in well-thought-out onsite campaigns can significantly amplify your marketing efforts, driving a notable increase in conversion rates and better capturing paid traffic. 

Here’s how you can design campaigns that catch the eye and convert browsers into buyers.

Segment, segment, segment

The more targeted your campaign, the better your results — plain and simple.

By segmenting your audience based on specific criteria, such as the amount spent with your brand or past products purchased, you can tailor your messages to match the unique interests and buying habits of different customer groups. 

Note: Gorgias is deeply integrated with platforms like Shopify, so it’s easy to leverage shopper data to create highly personalized onsite campaigns that resonate with your audience. 

Identify your triggers to personalize messages

Set up your campaigns to activate based on specific behaviors, such as browsing certain products, adding items to the cart, or showing signs of exit intent. You can also use more niche triggers, like:

• Total value of shopping cart
• Products in cart
• Time spent on a page
• Number of visits
• Total spent in the past
• VIP status

For instance, by setting up a trigger for VIP customers, you can send campaigns to those high-value shoppers, like exclusive discounts or personalized style recommendations based on past purchases.

A/B test your campaigns

One of the most powerful tools in your marketing arsenal is A/B testing. By systematically testing messaging, design, or offer variations, you can uncover what resonates most with your audience and refine your strategies accordingly.

TUSHY provides a prime example of A/B testing done right. They conducted an experiment where:

• Group A: 50% of visitors experienced the full suite of targeted on-site campaigns without any discount codes, focusing instead on providing personalized guidance for choosing the right bidet.
• Group B: The other 50% did not receive any targeted campaigns during their visit.

The results were telling:

• Conversion rate lift: Group A saw a 9.6% higher conversion rate than Group B.
• Sales uplift: Additionally, sales increased by 14% compared to those not exposed to the campaigns.

This test highlights the effectiveness of providing personalized support over just using discounts and how A/B testing your offers and messaging — even for one week — helps you understand what makes your customers tick.

Keep track of your success in a detailed dashboard

Effective campaign management isn't just about launching strategies; it’s also about understanding their impact. 

With Gorgias Convert, every campaign you run is tracked in detail through the Campaigns Statistics dashboard. This gives marketers a granular view of performance across different time frames and campaign specifics.

Some specific features you can expect are

• Revenue tracking: See at a glance the total revenue generated by each campaign. This allows you to evaluate the financial impact of your campaigns and prioritize those that deliver the best return on investment.
• Engagement metrics: Monitor key metrics like impressions and click-through rates to assess how well your campaigns are engaging potential customers. This data is crucial for understanding which elements of your campaigns are capturing attention and which may need tweaking.
• Conversion details: Dive deep into the data to see which campaigns are converting browsers into buyers. A list of converted tickets or interactions can highlight successful tactics and offer insights into customer behavior.

In addition to tracking basic metrics, the dashboard also provides insights into more nuanced aspects of campaign performance, such as engagement trends over time or the effectiveness of specific call-to-action placements.

Check out an overview of the Campaign Statistics page in the image below. 

Start investing in onsite marketing

Onsite campaigns stand as pillars in digital marketing, carrying immense potential to captivate and convert visitors into loyal customers. Through them, you can get directly in front of your customers and showcase products or services – but in their capacity to tailor experiences, foster engagement, and ultimately drive conversions. 

Gorgias Convert's innovative approach makes revenue generation easy through onsite campaigns - you will find that you’re increasing your ecommerce revenue quickly and cost-effectively. By leveraging this tool, you can navigate the digital landscape with confidence whether you’re in CX or Marketing. 

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Quick summary:

• Gross merchandise value is the total value of goods sold on a platform before any deductions.
• GMV offers an incomplete view of financial health because it doesn’t include the cost of fees and returns.
• Compare GMV with other metrics like revenue, customer acquisition cost (CAC), average order value, churn rate, and customer satisfaction to get a full view of business performance.
• Increase GMV by offering free shipping, upselling and cross-selling, creating product bundles, offering discounts and great customer service.
  

Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) is a useful metric to monitor when running an ecommerce site. Traditionally, it’s one of the first numbers online merchants try to improve sales. It sounds simple enough: If you increase GMV, you’ll make more money, right?

Not so fast.

Like any single metric, GMV has its shortcomings, too. Below we’ll explain the right way to think about GMV and ways to increase GMV that can lead to more profit, not just more revenue. 

What is Gross Merchandise Value (GMV)?

Gross merchandise value measures the total value of goods sold on a platform or marketplace over a specific period of time. GMV is the full amount customers pay before deductions like fees, discounts, or returns.

GMV and revenue are not interchangeable. Revenue is what remains after subtracting deductions from the GMV.

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How to calculate Gross Merchandise Value (GMV): formula + example

You can use the following formula to calculate GMV:

Gross merchandise value =  sales price of goods x number of items sold

Example of GMV

If you sell something for $100 through Etsy and Etsy takes a 10% commission, that’s $100 GMV for Etsy. 

In terms of revenue, $90 of revenue is for you and $10 of revenue for Etsy. 

If you sell something for $100 on your own website, your GMV and revenue are $100.

What Gross Merchandise Value does (and doesn’t) tell you

GMV provides insight into a platform's sales strength before considering deductions, but it doesn't reflect actual revenue or profit. 

In this section, we'll examine the advantages, limitations, and risks of depending solely on GMV to evaluate your business' performance.

Benefits of using GMV

GMV is a versatile metric that can be used for more than just evaluating how profitable your business is. Here are the five benefits of using GMV:

1. Provides a performance snapshot. GMV offers a quick and straightforward snapshot of a platform's sales volume, making it easy to gauge how well products or services are moving.
2. Helps to inform pricing and strategy. GMV data can inform pricing and marketing strategies which can help optimize your approach to increasing sales.
3. Makes identifying trends easier. Being able to access and compare data from different time periods, products, or platforms allows you to detect patterns and ecommerce trends more easily.
4. Attracts investors. Investors often use GMV as an indicator of a business's growth potential, making it a valuable metric for attracting investment.
5. Can be used as the baseline for sales targets. GMV can serve as a useful reference point for setting sales targets and assessing progress toward those targets.

What GMV doesn’t tell you

Although GMV offers valuable insights, it falls short of capturing a complete financial overview of your business. Let's look at some drawbacks of relying on GMV alone.

1. Lacks profit information. GMV doesn't reveal actual profit figures, preventing you from gauging your business’ financial health accurately.
2. Excludes expenses. GMV doesn’t account for any accrued fees and expenses associated with sales, like shipping cost, marketing, and platform fees. This incomplete metric may lead to an overly optimistic view of your business’s profitability.
3. Ignores customer returns. GMV doesn't account for customer returns, potentially overstating sales figures and misleading investors.
4. Inconsistent growth. When you prioritize GMV, you may want to push sales volume rather than focusing on profitability. There are plenty of ecommerce growth tactics beyond increasing sales.
5. Vulnerable to manipulation. Unfortunately, GMV can be manipulated by companies to create the appearance of growth without corresponding financial gains.

How to use GMV properly

The best way to use GMV is to complement it with other essential key performance indicators (KPIs). Here's how you can use GMV in tandem with other metrics:

• Revenue: Combine GMV with actual revenue to understand the impact of deductions like returns, discounts, and fees. This helps you assess how efficiently GMV translates into actual income.
• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): By comparing GMV with CAC, you can evaluate the effectiveness of your ecommerce strategy and help determine your return on investment (ROI).
• Average Order Value (AOV): Analyzing GMV alongside AOV allows you to explore opportunities to increase revenue by encouraging larger or more frequent purchases.
• Churn rate: GMV coupled with churn rate helps you assess the impact of losing customers on your sales. A high GMV may be exacerbated by a high churn rate, leading to lower overall profitability.
• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS): Combining GMV with customer satisfaction metrics can help identify the correlation between customer happiness and spending, enabling you to prioritize efforts that improve both.

How to increase Gross Merchandise Value

If you’re looking for ways to improve GMV for your ecommerce website, here are four ways to do that.

1. Offer free shipping

Free shipping is a popular option for online shopping, where customers don’t have to pay for delivery. Free shipping is attractive to customers who are sensitive to price and prefer a simple pricing structure. 

Here is a good example from Teddy Fresh:

Two different ways to offer free shipping to increase GMV:

• Order over a specific dollar amount: Highlight a free-shipping threshold to encourage customers to order more items to meet that limit and receive free delivery. 
• Offer free shipping within a specific period: Do this if you want to improve GMV during slow periods.  

🛒 Setting up an ecommerce store? Check out our list of the best Shopify themes.

2. Upsell and cross-sell products

Upselling is a strategy to sell a superior, more expensive version of a product that a customer already owns (or just bought). Meanwhile, cross-selling means selling related products to the one a customer already owns (or just bought). 

To upsell products, you can offer larger sizes, adding more features, or increasing performance. For example, if a customer wants a 4GB graphics card, upsell them to 16GB with a limited-time discount and a slightly higher price than their previous choice. 

For cross-sell, you can add a “frequently bought with this item” or “who bought this bought this” section on your product pages. Or promote accessories on the cart page as Cariuma does in the below example: 

3. Add bundles

Product bundling is when you package complimentary products as a group of items that can be purchased together at a discount or a lower price than when purchased separately. 

You can bundle products together as an upsell or a cross-sell. Alternatively, you can create a unique product bundle, either in a gift box or special wrapping. 

Winc is just one example of an online store that has capitalized on an opportunity for product education and curation with subscription boxes. The brand uses a quiz to help customers determine the right bottle of wine that satisfies their tastes. Then, offer curated boxes of items that meet their preferences. 

When you have a lot of slow-moving inventory products, it’s a great idea to bundle them with popular items. Doing that will help freshen up your old or overstocked inventory and increase sales. 

By offering bundles, you can also make customers feel that they got a good deal — even though they’ve likely spent more than they planned to. 

Setting up your Shopify store? See our list of the best Shopify apps for ecommerce merchants.

4. Offer bulk discount

Bulk discount (also known as bulk pricing or volume discount) is a sales strategy that encourages customers to purchase more and with higher quantities at a lower price. This is particularly useful if you’re selling items that are typically bought in bulk. 

Note that you can also use free gifts or free products to incentivize customers who spend more on your store. Cotopaxi did a great job of using this tactic. This store offers customers free masks if they spend beyond a certain threshold.

5. Provide top-notch customer service

Approximately 95% of customers say that customer service is important to their choice of and loyalty to a brand. And 80% of customers consider the experience a company provides as important as its products.

These are just a few of many key customer service statistics, but enough to prove that an excellent customer service experience impacts your bottom line. 

When you take time to answer customers’ questions on social media and live chat, you build trust with them and make them feel safe to buy from you.

When you’re proactive in reducing returns, you have a chance to turn them into new sales. Your customer might be satisfied with an exchange instead of asking for a refund.

That strengthens your brand confidence and encourages customers to come back to your store. 

After all, retaining an existing customer is five times cheaper than finding a new one. By delivering exceptional customer service, you give your customers a convincing reason to stay with your business forever. 

A final thought about GMV

GMV is helpful if you’re selling on marketplaces like Etsy, Amazon, or Alibaba. But as said earlier, you shouldn’t focus too much on improving GMV. There are more important ecommerce KPIs you should follow to measure how your store performs. 

Also, it’s one thing to increase GMV; it’s another thing to maintain excellent customer service when you have more orders. Take care of your customers first to create an incredible shopping experience for them, and you’ll improve your bottom line sooner or later. 

If you’re looking for a solution to help you handle a flood of customer requests, let Gorgias lend you a hand.

‍Sign up for a Gorgias account and enjoy all the features you need in an ecommerce help desk in a 7-day free trial.

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TL;DR:

• Customer experience automation (CXA) can enhance revenue and increase customer satisfaction.
• CXA platforms convert manual tasks into automatic processes, improving customer service operations.
• Implementing CXA improves ROI, resolves issues faster, and delivers personalized experiences at scale.
• Real-world examples show how automation can improve customer experience and boost conversions.

The thought of automating repetitive customer service tasks has likely crossed your mind. But often, that consideration is followed by a train of concerns: Will automation eliminate personal touch? Will it reduce the quality of customer service? Will it replace human agents?

In reality, customer service automation (CXA) can enhance your revenue and increase customer satisfaction.

Read on to learn more about CXA and get four easy ways to automate. We'll also share a story of how one company successfully implemented CXA and gained 23% more conversions.

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What is customer experience automation (CXA)? 

Customer experience automation (CXA) refers to the process of automating and enhancing the interactions that customers have with a business. It involves using automation tools like a helpdesk, Macros, Rules, and artificial intelligence to automate various aspects of customer engagement, from pre-sales and support to the post-purchase stage.

What is a customer experience automation platform? 

A customer experience automation platform is a tool that can convert manual customer experience tasks into automatic processes. CXA platforms aim to alleviate the workload of human customer service agents while optimizing customer service operations.

Gorgias, for instance, is a leading example of a CXA platform, offering a wide range of powerful features, such as:

• Efficient ticket triage
• Automated responses across various channels
• Automated order management
• Automated emails
• Smart Article Recommendations via Chat and email
• Powerful integrations with ecommerce platforms‎
  

The impact that CXA can have on your customer experience (and bottom line)

Implementing CXA is not just about lightening your team's workload, it's a transformative strategy that greatly influences how customers interact with and perceive your brand. CXA ensures that your team can focus on more intricate interactions, resulting in an improved ROI, increased customer loyalty, and offering personalized experiences at scale.

Improve ROI for your support & experience teams

Customer service agents who have poor impressions of their companies say they don’t have all the tools they need to do their job. Factors like clunky software and insufficient training and processes all contribute to their experience, which, in turn, affects the overall customer experience. 

The solution is to equip agents with powerful tools, like CXA, that will make their jobs easier and your customers’ experiences more enjoyable. Automation and an improved customer service ROI go hand in hand, leading to faster and more profitable customer experiences.

Help customers resolve issues faster

One of the immediate benefits of CXA is faster resolution times. With automation handling routine tasks like resolving where is my order (WISMO) requests and answering pre-sales questions, agents have more time to attend to complex support tickets and meet customer expectations with precise answers.

Deliver more personalized experiences at scale

Most automation skeptics fear losing the human touch once you bring automation into the picture. However, the reality is quite the opposite. A comprehensive CXA strategy allows support teams to express their brand voice and personality through adjustable features like pre-written templates or Macros. If your CXA platform restricts you from customizing default responses, you should find a tool that can adapt to you and your customers.

CXA in action: 4 easy ways to use automation to improve the customer experience

Now that we've covered the theory, it's time for your support team to implement CXA. Below are the top four ways to quickly incorporate customer experience automation using Gorgias Automate. We'll provide details on each feature, offer tips to get the most out of them, and showcase examples of how these strategies have worked for actual merchants.

1) Use Quick Responses to give customers instant answers to simple questions

Quick Responses are predefined replies automatically triggered when customers ask specific questions in Chat.

When to use: For teams who receive a daily flow of frequently asked questions that require them to copy and paste the same responses.

Tips: 

• Quick Responses are best for answering FAQs that have straightforward answers and don’t need elaborate explanations
• Infuse your brand messaging and vocabulary into your Quick Responses to maintain natural interactions with shoppers
• Always provide a route back to live support channels through email, live chat, phone, SMS, or social media in case customers need more assistance

Real-world results: The stationery company Ohh Deer achieved an impressive average 4.95 CSAT score and generated about $12,500 per quarter after implementing Gorgias Chat alone.

📚 Related: Why customer service chatbots aren’t a great fit for ecommerce

2) Use Tags and Rules to organize and prioritize customer tickets

Take advantage of efficient ticket triage by using Tags and Rules to ensure the most important tickets are addressed and complex tickets are routed to your most knowledgeable agents.

When to use: If urgent tickets (billing issues, product defects, and inquiries from returning customers) are getting buried in your inbox, you have a low retention rate, a high churn rate, or your inbox is disorganized.

Tips:

• Create “Urgent” and “Not Urgent” Tags to establish a streamlined prioritization process for agents to follow
• Use Rules to direct complex tickets to more experienced agents so you avoid compromising resolution times and customer satisfaction
• Create a Rule to remind agents to follow up on customers who have recently contacted your contact center

Real-world results: Drinkware brand BrüMate cut down their first response time from 5 hours to 1 minute and 30 seconds and drove $9M in revenue after they made use of Chat Campaigns and a Help Center (Gorgias’s customer knowledge base).

Colin Waters, BrüMate’s former Associate Director of Customer Experience, highlights that organizing Tags and Macros by their proper names keeps team onboarding running smoothly. He adds, “I'm very steady with naming conventions. I mean, my team must hate it. But anybody could come in and figure out what it all means without having a doctorate in CX."

3) Automate the order management, tracking, and returns process

Order management, including order creation, tracking, returns, and exchanges, is one of the aspects of customer service that is best suited to automation because of its repetitive nature.

When to use: If you get an influx of WISMO tickets and/or return-related inquiries in your inbox or need to streamline your order workflow.

Tips: 

• Enable tracking, returning, and canceling in Chat to allow customers to quickly check their orders 
• Automate order status notification emails to trigger after hitting milestones in the entire customer journey, such as order confirmations, order delivery, and post-purchase customer feedback requests
• Integrate Loop Returns with Gorgias to automate your returns process and create a returns portal

Real-world results: Jaxxon includes their Return Policy in Chat via Quick Responses and maintains an easily accessible Return Portal. By maximizing their self-service resources, they brought in a staggering 46% more in revenue.

4) Use AI to recommend Help Center articles 

Your articles shouldn’t only be found in your Help Center; make the most out of your resources by sharing them on multiple channels like Chat and email. Making your articles widespread gains you two benefits: an educated customer base and faster resolution times.

When to use: If you have a high return rate and negative customer reviews or sense a lack of understanding from your customers about your product.

Tips: 

• Insert Help Center articles into customer communications to build anticipation and proactively address issues
• Create Chat Campaigns to automate the customer education process, offering targeted information and support
• Scenarios where you can use chat campaigns: holidays and limited-time offers, for customers browsing high-value products, at checkout to reduce cart abandonment

Real-world results: After creating Chat Campaigns that displayed welcome discounts and toilet compatibility checkers to shoppers, TUSHY achieved an impressive 25% increase in revenue and improved customer satisfaction. They also brought their bounce rate down by 37%.

Success story: How Kirby Allison boosted conversions by 23% with CXA

If the previous real-world examples weren’t enough to convince you about automation’s integral role in CX, here’s another success story. 

Kirby Allison, a luxury garment care business, struggled to handle a growing volume of repetitive and time-consuming tasks. Surviving on a minuscule two-person customer support team, they were drowning in tickets outside business hours.

Once they enlisted the help of Automate, it was a weight off their shoulders. Gorgias’s multifunctional Chat provided 24/7 support with Quick Responses, self-service Order Management, and Article Recommendations.

Immediately, Kirby Allison saw a 46% increase in sales, a 23% increase in conversions, and drastically reduced response times.

If you want to make huge successes easy wins — take the first step towards transforming your customer service and book a Gorgias Automate demo today.

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With so many distractions across platforms, it’s getting trickier to hold shoppers’ attention — even on your own website. You’re lucky to get even a couple of seconds of their time. But don't worry, we've got the perfect bait for your brand.

Gorgias Convert is specially designed to capture shoppers at the right time with the right messaging. This onsite conversion strategy tool launches subtle yet compelling campaigns, allowing ecommerce brands to engage customers like never before.

In this article, we'll dive into how you can refine your messaging to increase conversion rate, boost order value (AOV), reduce bounce rates with clever exit intent triggers, and educate customers through engaging quizzes and informative content. 

Get ready to craft campaign messaging that truly connects and drives customers to buy.

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The top 6 ways to create captivating & compelling campaigns

Different goals call for different campaigns. Here are the top six methods to create compelling campaigns that resonate with your customers.

Why should you care?

Compelling campaigns matter if you want to drive engagement and conversions. If your message doesn’t resonate with shoppers, they’ll exit without taking action. 

Customize your content to your shopper's specific needs — it can make all the difference in capturing attention and winning over a new customer.

1. Put a face to your stories

Relatability is the magnet that pulls shoppers closer to considering your product. It’s why brands highly incentivize social proof like customer reviews and influencer endorsements. 

Combine stories with social proof through relatable customer story campaigns or behind-the-scenes campaigns. When your customers see someone who genuinely enjoys your product, it nudges them one step closer to the checkout.

How STYLEST did it

Innovative swimwear brand STYLEST gives customers a VIP shopping touch with a campaign that shows their co-founder Chrissy talking about the benefits of their bras. For shoppers unaware of the brand, a firsthand account from the creator leads to a deeper connection to the brand’s mission and products. 

STYLEST created a total of eight campaigns made for different scenarios and customers. At its peak, their campaigns drove 18% of the brand’s total revenue — a remarkable achievement since pop-ups typically influence only 2-5% of revenue.

2. Incorporate visuals

Plain text campaigns can be easy to gloss over. Instead, add visuals to your campaigns, like images, infographics, emojis, or videos, to easily break up text and capture attention.

However, make sure not to overload visuals or text with information. For instance, if you’re making a video tutorial, keep it short and on message. Meandering can cost you engagement.

How Kreyol Essence did it

Haircare brand Kreyol Essence’s welcome campaign is simple but eye-catching: a greeting with a sparkle emoji. Friendly language is a fantastic way to invite shoppers to connect with your support team and find what they’re looking for.

Kreyol Essence created welcome campaigns, product recommendation campaigns, and promo campaigns to lower the barrier to entry for new customers. In three months, they reached an incredible average conversion rate of 11.47% — 8% more than the industry benchmark.

3. Offer personalized product recommendations

According to 1,100+ survey responses, customers want personalized experiences. With product recommendation campaigns, you can deliver just that. Feature a selection of products to upsell and cross-sell in targeted campaigns, then choose which kinds of shoppers receive them.

Three effective scenarios to use product recommendations:

• For visitors viewing a specific product or collection: Suggest product bundles or add-on products that align with what they’re already browsing to increase purchase likelihood. For example, if someone is viewing a shampoo product page, a campaign can suggest a conditioner to go with it.
• For first-time visitors: Showcase best-sellers or trending products to new visitors, helping them discover items they might like.
• During seasonal sales: Feature related products in your holiday or special sale campaigns, promoting bundles or discounted add-ons to boost overall sales.

How LSKD did it

Australia-based sportswear brand LSKD puts eyes on their three newest products by appearing to shoppers with empty carts. This condensed list of recommendations makes buying easier for customers who don’t know where to start.

4. Provide incentives that are unique to the shopper

Give shoppers a reason to stay longer. Exit intent campaigns can be the last-ditch effort to retain customers who are about to leave. Make sure these campaigns are enticing, down to the selling point and message.

Here are the four essential elements to getting your campaign messaging right:

• Offer value: Provide an irresistible offer, such as a discount code or free gift, to persuade customers to stay. Convert enables users to select a generic discount code or a personalized, unique discount code, which can be more enticing and drive higher clickthrough rates (CTR).
• Highlight the benefits: Highlight what customers will gain shopping with you, like free shipping, discounts, or exclusive gifts on top of their order.
• Personalize the message: Customers like to feel seen. Use customer profiles (i.e., subscriber vs. not) or reference items they've viewed to make the offer more relevant.
• Keep it concise: Use clear, direct language and a strong call to action.

How Impact Dog Crates did it

Premium dog crate retailer Impact Dog Crates anticipates uncertain customers by allowing one free exchange per order. They show off this perk to browsing customers in just a couple of sentences — simple and effective.

5. Educate customers with fun, engaging material

Businesses win 28.9% more new customers when they implement customer education programs, according to Intellum. 

For browsing shoppers, you don’t need a formal program, just a quick educational campaign that appears while they look through your products. Empowering shoppers with information about product knowledge can lead to better buying decisions and, in turn, decrease return rates.

Educational campaign ideas:

• Interactive quiz campaign: Do you have a product line for specific needs and customers? Point customers to your sizing guide or product matching quiz for a personalized shopping experience that helps them find exactly what they need.
• Informative blog campaign: Share educational advice through a campaign and link out to a relevant blog post.
• Product tutorial campaign: Do customers often struggle with using your product? Demonstrate how to use your products by including a short video tutorial in the campaign.
• Product comparison campaign: Provide a side-by-side comparison of your products to help customers choose the best option.

How TUSHY did it

TUSHY, a leading bidet brand, recognized that many customers were concerned about bidet installation, leading to a spike in support tickets and abandoned carts. Their solution is an educational video campaign that proactively guides customers through installation. 

The campaign contributed to 25% of their revenue and a 37% drop in bounce rate. Most importantly, it cleared away installation anxieties and repetitive support inquiries and provided customers with a more confident buying experience.

6. Offer VIP support by having real-time conversations

Use conversational campaigns to show customers you're there to make shopping easier. Plus, personalized advice helps hesitant buyers make decisions.

Actionable Tips:

• Offer human support: Ensure seamless integration with human agents for more complex questions and personalized assistance.
• Leverage AI Agent: If your support agents can’t handle the conversation due to business hours, leverage Gorgias’s conversational AI tool, AI Agent, to handle pre-sales questions.

How Glamnetic did it

Accessory brand Glamnetic lets customers know they can call for help anytime, just by using Chat. Quick access to a customer support agent is a simple way to alleviate customer concerns.

Glamnetic’s strategic use of Convert campaigns drove an 18.39% on-ticket conversion rate for their top exit intent campaign and up to 49% more sales for new product promotions. They even saw a 12% increase in average order value. 

💡 Pro Tip: Unsure which message will resonate most with your audience? Use A/B testing to experiment with different messages, designs, or calls to action to see which version drives the best results. This data-driven approach takes the guesswork out of your content strategy so you can generate strong interest.

Get their attention with Gorgias Convert

Ready to take your campaigns to the next level? Gorgias Convert offers powerful tools to engage customers at the right moment with personalized, compelling messaging. 

If you’re looking to boost conversions, reduce bounce rates, or offer VIP support, Convert makes it easy to create campaigns that truly speak to your audience. Start capturing attention and driving results today with Gorgias Convert. Book a demo now.

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For any business, email plays a crucial role in providing great customer service. But helpful customer support emails take time and effort from your customer service agents. 

Templated responses save time for your customer service team and help customers get the resolution they need faster. With templates, reps can answer questions and resolve customer issues much faster than writing each email from scratch. And data from over 10,000 ecommerce brands shows that by lowering resolution time to under 6 hours, you can raise overall revenue by 2%

Templates also ensure high-quality support. They provide a consistent baseline that busy agents can lean on, especially during high-volume times. This is mission-critical for keeping happy customers around: 92% of customers say they’re more likely to return for a second purchase after a positive customer support experience. And repeat purchases (plus reviews, referrals, and higher average order values) mean repeat customers generate 300% more than first-time shoppers.  

‎Below, you’ll find 30+ effective customer service email templates to help you get started. Here are the top five email categories that you might find most helpful:

• Emails that provide proactive support
• Order status emails to preempt "Where is my order?" requests
• Emails to help with product exchanges, returns, and cancellations
• Angry customer response email templates
• Email templates to help you make sales

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5 tactics for writing better support emails 

Before you jump into writing any customer support emails, here are some best practices to keep in mind:

1. Fully evaluate what each customer is asking for
2. Convey empathy with the words you choose
3. Provide all of the answers and resources they need  
4. Practice forward resolution
5. Personalize the response to show that you’re listening

1. Fully evaluate what each customer is asking for

You need context and a deep understanding of a customer's situation to resolve their issue. But, going back and forth with customers to get there creates a high-effort experience for them, which often results in negative feelings toward the support experience. 

Using a platform that displays past customer information – between past conversations, recent orders, and the initial message, you have the best chance of fully understanding what went wrong and what the customer needs without making them repeat information. 

‎In your message, be sure to state what you understand to be the problem so they can correct you if you got something wrong.

2. Convey empathy with the words you choose

Putting yourself in the customer’s shoes can be challenging sometimes, but it’s vital if you want to leave them with a positive experience. Convey that you appreciate where they’re coming from by rephrasing their request, question, or concern. 

It’s especially tempting to shut down empathy when customers seem unreasonable or mean. Even if a customer is inflamed or incorrect, try not to call them out or prove them wrong. Instead, focus on what future solutions you can provide. Stick with the conversation and find out what’s beneath each message or customer complaint. 

Empathy and understanding why a customer is frustrated (and acknowledging any effort they’ve already put into solving the issue themselves) can go a long way towards finding a resolution that makes them happy. 

3. Provide all of the answers and resources they need  

Customer service email templates help save time and increase professionalism. But, keeping them up-to-date at all times is key. Make sure templates reflect your most up-to-date processes and policies and are robust enough to fully answer customer questions. 

You can always edit a template to suit the context of each conversation but the most effective templates will be complete with the best version of the answer possible. That might mean encouraging customers to reference return policies and shipping times, an FAQ section, or help center articles to ensure templates are as detailed and accurate as possible.

Here’s a great example of clear help resources from Bobbie, an organic baby formula brand, organized with a Gorgias help center:

Templates should always reflect the voice and tone of your company. What your brand voice is — formal, casual, friendly, professional — determines the exact words your templates will use. 

4. Practice forward resolution

Forward resolution is where agents anticipate and answer customer questions before they even happen. Take a look through past conversations where you went back-and-forth many times with a customer to see if there are any patterns in the types of questions that came up. 

For example, imagine customers often write in asking whether you ship to Canada. If you just respond, "Yes, we ship to Canada," then they may respond "What are the shipping rates and estimated shipping times for Canada?" That would be a good sign to include that information in your original email, avoiding the need for a follow-up.

This way you save the customer the frustration of wondering where their order is, the time to reach out to your support team, and you save your agents the time it would take to answer their question.

📚 Learn more: Customer Delight Is A Losing Strategy in Ecommerce: Here’s What’s Better

5. Personalize the response to show that you’re listening 

Also keep in mind that templates are customizable tools, not complete solutions. Personalize your customer service emails to give them as much human touch and personality as your brand allows. This way, the customer knows they’re interacting with a real human and are also being treated like one as well. One risk of using templates comes when they aren’t personalized. Templates are amazing starting points, but they should always be personalized to the customer you’re chatting with. 

Some quick ideas for how to do this:

• Use your name and the customer’s name within the body text
• Repeat customer feedback so they know you’re actively listening
• Tweak boilerplate language to fit the actual customer issue
• Say, in your own words, how the situation will affect their workflow or day-to-day life (positive or negative) 
• If your customer is in a certain time zone, you could personalize your greeting with the time of day it is for them

30+ helpful customer service email templates 

Relying on well-built customer service templates for chats or emails can help you increase customer satisfaction and improve the customer experience. If customer support agents spend less time responding to the same repetitive questions, they'll have more time to support your pre-sales support strategy and have conversations that drive revenue. 

Below, we offer 30+ customer service email templates, categorized by the types of support conversations brands often have with customers. Feel free to read the templates in order or skip around to whichever is most relevant to your needs.

Email templates that provide proactive support

Proactive customer service starts before a new customer writes into your support team. Rather than waiting for customers to experience a problem before starting a conversation, you can set the tone for a positive customer relationship by reaching out and saying hello. 

Similarly, if you anticipate a problem for customers (like outages or pricing increases), it’s best to let them know with a proactive message.

You can also complement your proactive email templates with self-service resources, including FAQ pages and Help Centers. 

Below are some of the most helpful proactive support email templates you can start using today. While you can use the templates as they are, we suggest tweaking them to meet your individual voice and tone guidelines. 

1) Welcome new customers

Sending a welcome email makes customers feel like part of a community and can offer them key resources that allow them to self-serve answers to common questions, like return policies or shipping costs. 

Hey there {{Customer First Name}},

Thanks for {{Customer action: First purchase, sign-up, subscription}} with {{Company name}}. We’re thrilled that you’ve joined us, and we’re excited to help awesome customers like you in any way we can.

I know you’ve just joined us, so I want to send over {{Resource/offer links}} so you can get the most out of your experience with us.

If you haven’t yet, make sure to check out {{Blog link}} for ongoing tutorials, tips, and stories, and give us a follow on social media! 

I hope you’re already enjoying {{Product name}}, but if not, I’m happy to help. Or you can check out our {{FAQs or knowledge base links}} to troubleshoot on your own.

If there’s anything you need, please respond to this email. We’re here for you!

Best,

{{Current agent first name}}

2) Announce a new support channel or a new product/service 

Email is a great place to announce that you just launched a new support channel. It’s also a good channel if you’d like to involve your support team as a resource for new product launches or service offerings. 

Hi {{Customer name}}, 

Good news! We now offer {{Action or item}}. 

Questions? Reach out to us at {{Phone number, website URL, etc}} and we’ll get back to you within {{SLA}}. 

Looking forward to hearing from you! 

{{Company name}}

3) Announce a new self-service resource

Similar to the announcement above, let customers know when you launch a Help Center or self-service resource. 

Hi {{Customer name}}, 

Good news! In order to better support you, we’ve created a {{Self service resource with link}}. Here you’ll find answers to frequently asked questions and step-by-step instructions to set up and troubleshoot our products. We hope making this information more accessible provides a better experience — but always feel free to reach out to us directly for additional help! 

{{Company name}}

📚 Recommended reading: 29 Customer Service Scripts Inspired by Top Ecommerce Brands.

Email templates are even more powerful when combined with equally powerful customer service scripts, keeping your brand messaging consistent and on-target across channels. 

4) Provide renewal reminders to avoid passive churn

If your business includes a subscription-based product, you’ll want to provide reminders to customers that their subscription is about to renew.

Remember: Letting customers easily opt in and out is always the best decision for customer experience. While an easy opt-out process may sound scary for retention rate, you’ll actually do more harm by making customers jump through hoops to cancel their subscription. They’ll likely speak about the poor experience with friends and avoid coming back. 

💡 Tip: If you can let customers self-serve any subscription changes or updates, you eliminate the need for them to reach out to support to do so. Providing links within a subscription reminder email to unsubscribe, skip, or delay a delivery gives customers the ability to do it easily on their end, eliminating a touch point with support and reducing effort for the customer.

Hello {{Customer first name}},

This is a reminder that your subscription for {{Product name}} will renew automatically on {{Renewal date}}. We’ll continue charging the credit card ending in {{Last four digits of credit card number}}. No action needed from you, we’ll process and ship the order in 3-5 business days.

If you want to skip this shipment, click here: {{Link to skip shipment}}

If you want to unsubscribe, click here: {{Link to unsubscribe}}

Thanks,

{{Current agent first name}}

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📚 Recommended reading: Learn how to retain 20% of customers you lose to passive churn and raise overall revenue by up to 0.5%.

5) Announce website or product outages

If you have a planned outage coming up, a quick email goes a long way to stop panicked questions from rolling in. It also allows customers to plan for an outage, especially if your website is one they rely on or visit often. 

Hi {{Customer first name}},

We’re currently experiencing a service outage for {{Website / Product / Service}}. We’re actively working on resolving the issue, which we believe is due to {{Reason for outage}}. We apologize for the inconvenience and assure you we’ll have everything up and running as quickly as possible.

Stay tuned at {{Website / Social media page}} for the latest updates.

Thanks, 

{{Current agent first name}}

6) Announce a pricing increase

Raising prices, especially for a subscription service that’s automatically billed monthly? Loyal customers likely want a heads up and an explanation. If you give customers enough notice, it keeps them from feeling swindled.  

Hi {{Customer first name}},

Starting on {{Date}} we are increasing the pricing for {{Product or service}} to {{New pricing information}}. 

We don’t take pricing increases lightly, and we know it’s not the news our customers want to hear! Given {{Reason for pricing increase}}, we feel that this is the right move for our business and the best way to continue offering the best product possible. 

We are grateful to have you as a customer! 

{{Company name}} 

Order status update (before an order ships) emails

‎"Where is my order" is the main repetitive question that businesses get — up to 40% of all tickets, for some brands using Gorgias. Automating shipping confirmation emails and including a tracking number will provide a better shipping experience that doesn’t require shoppers to contact you whenever they want an update.

A helpdesk or customer service platform like Gorgias can help. Gorgias’s Macros automatically pull important personalized variables like the most recent order number or tracking information into the template. This is possible because Gorgias has a direct connection to your Shopify, BigCommerce, or Magento store, and can save your team hours each week. 

‎Regardless of whether you use Macros or another solution, here are a few plug-and-play email templates to get you started:

7) Change shipping address

Customers might be in the process of moving, planned a last minute trip, or realized they used an outdated shipping address for an order, which can cause panic. A quick email resolution will put them at ease and ensure their order goes to the right location. 

Hi {{Customer first name}},

I’ve updated your shipping address for order {{Number of last order}} and you should be all set now. You will receive a confirmation email when your package ships. 

Let me know if there’s anything else I can help with! 

{{Current agent first name}}

8) Order/shipping status (Where is my order?): Not shipped, preorder

When a customer inquires about an order that hasn’t shipped yet or an order that includes a pre-order item, make sure agents know your own internal policy and warehouse process. If something looks stuck for a long period of time (and it’s outside the warehouse’s SLA (Service level agreement), agents might have to open an internal investigation. 

Hi {{Customer first name}}, 

Thanks for getting in touch. 

It looks like your last order (order {{Number of last order}} from {{Date of last order}} includes a pre-order item. These take a bit longer to ship! 

If you haven’t received a tracking number in the next five days, please respond back to me and I’ll look into it. 

Thanks for your patience! 

{{Current agent first name}}

9) Order/shipping status (Where is my order?): Not shipped

Sometimes items take longer to ship than usual, or a customer isn’t familiar with your company’s estimated dispatch times. This is a common question, and its response can quell fears of an order being lost or out of stock. 

Hello {{Customer first name}}, 

Thank you for reaching out! Your order {{Number of last order}} has been received and we are working on getting it shipped out. Our processing time to ship an order is 3-5 business days, excluding weekends. 

We will email you a confirmation once it ships, which will include your tracking information as well. 

If you have any questions in the meantime, please don’t hesitate to reach out. 

Thanks, 

{{Current agent first name}}

10) Order Is out of stock

This template proactively informs shoppers of a delay and lets them know when they can expect their order to ship. 

Hi {{Customer first name}},

We wanted to let you know that your most recent order {{Number of last order}} is currently out of stock. We’re doing everything we can to get more in stock soon and we apologize for the delay!

The good news is that our next shipment should arrive by {{Date of availability}}, and you should receive your order within {{Number of business days}} once the item(s) gets to our warehouse.

Thanks for your patience! We’ll get you taken care of as soon as possible.

{{Current agent first name}}

11) Order change/cancel: Cancel and refund last order 

Sometimes customers change their minds about an order, and want to cancel before it gets shipped out so they don’t have to deal with returning it. This template provides a speedy response and solution. 

Hi {{Customer first name}}, 

I’ve canceled your last order (order {{Number of last order}}) and issued a refund. As a reminder, this was for {{Product name}} purchased on a credit card ending in {{Last four digits of credit card number}}.

The refund itself can take 3 to 5 days to process and will refund the original amount to the same card. Please let me know if you don’t see this reflected in your account after that time. 

Here if you need us, 

{{Current agent first name}}

12) Order change/cancel: Customer changed mind 

Simple automations can help catch requests like this before it’s too late. With Gorgias, you can swap out items (like switching a blue bike for a black one) without leaving the helpdesk, thanks to its deep integration with your ecommerce platform. 

Hi {{Customer First Name}}, 

Absolutely! I’ve swapped out {{Item name}} for the {{Item name}} you originally selected for order {{Number of last order}}. 

If you need anything else, just say the word. 

Best, 

{{Current agent first name}}

📚Recommended reading: Check out or post on how to prioritize customer requests so urgent questions like these don't get lost

Update on order status (after an order ships) email templates

‎Shipping comes with its own challenges: issues with carriers, delays due to weather or staffing, orders getting lost, or increased volume during busy seasons slows packages down. As a company, first align on your policy for shipping-related issues. Then, you can incorporate templated work flows that include features like a snooze button. This can come in handy when you need the customer to take action before you can help, like looking out for a package that was supposedly delivered.  

Gorgias Macros have a snooze functionality that reminds support agents to follow up in a given amount of time. For example, a Macro might snooze the ticket for two days to remind an agent to check back in about an order status. 

13) Order/shipping status (Where is my order?): Shipped

An extremely common question, customers like to be able to follow along with tracking information to see exactly when their order will arrive, whether they’re excited or need it by a certain date. 

Hello {{Customer first name}}, 

Thank you for reaching out! Your order has shipped and I’ve included the information below so that you can track it right to your doorstep. 

Order: {{Number of last order}}

Shipping date: {{Shipping date of last order}}

Tracking number: {{Tracking url of last order}}

Get back in touch if you need any more help. 

Thanks, 

{{Current agent first name}}

📚Related reading: Learn more about where is my order (WISMO) requests and how to reduce them with convenient self-service.

14) Order change/cancel: Already shipped

Sometimes shoppers change their mind when it’s too late, so having a template that lets them know how they can get a refund or an exchange quickly gives them a resolution, even if it’s not exactly what they want. 

Hi {{Customer first name}}, 

Thank you for reaching out to us! 

Unfortunately, it looks like your order {{Number of last order}} has already been shipped from our warehouse. Therefore, I’m unable to make any changes to it at this time. 

If possible, refuse the package at delivery. If that’s not possible, please let me know and I will send you a prepaid shipping label so that you can send the order back to us. Once we receive the order back at our warehouse, I will send a {{Replacement or refund}} to you right away. 

{{Current agent first name}}

15) Order is lost 

A lost order can be frustrating, especially because it means that it’s been delayed. This template offers a solution to get a shopper a new item or get them their money back.  

Hi {{Customer First Name}},

Thank you for reaching out! I’m so sorry to hear that you were unable to locate the missing package. Rest assured we will remedy this situation for you. 

I have two options to offer: we can ship a replacement to you or issue a full refund for the order instead. If you prefer a replacement order, we kindly ask that you confirm the shipping address of where you would like the replacement order sent. We look forward to receiving your reply.

{{Current agent first name}}

📚 Recommended reading: Learn how to deal with lost ecommerce packages.

Update on order status (order has arrived) email templates

‎Once an order arrives, customers might need help locating a missing package, initiating a return or exchange, or getting a replacement for a damaged item. 

16) Order/shipping status (Where is my order?): Delivered, not received 

Similar to a lost order, one that shows as being delivered but that hasn’t been received can cause anxiety for customers. This template offers up a solution and shares the internal policy for these types of packages. 

Hi {{Customer first name}}, 

I'm sorry to hear that you haven't received your order yet. It does appear to be in a delivered status. Sometimes this can be due to an incorrect scan by the carrier. If the package doesn't show up in the next {{Insert the number of days according to your policy}} please reach back out and we will {{insert internal policy}}. 

In the meantime, I've contacted the carrier and will be investigating on my end. 

Please reach out if I can help with anything else and I will keep an eye out for your email regarding the package.

{{Current agent first name}}

17) Item arrived damaged 

Items that shipped damaged or were damaged in transit can break trust between customer and company or spike quality concerns, especially for first-time purchases. This template asks for an image of the item so that the agent can offer a quick solution. 

Hi {{Customer First Name}}, 

Thanks for reaching out about your recent order {{Number of last order}}. I’m sorry to hear about your experience. As we try our best to provide exceptional service, some factors like shipping and handling are out of our control and issues like this can happen.  

Please send us a photo of the broken/damaged item(s) you received and we’ll do our best to resolve this as soon as possible. 

{{Current agent first name}} 

18) Item arrived damaged – follow up

A follow up email for items that arrived damaged. 

Hi {{Customer First Name}}, 

Thanks for sending over the photo of your damaged item. I've ordered a replacement to go out {{Insert policy: free of charge, just pay the cost of shipping, etc}}. Once the item ships we will send you an email confirmation. 

For your damaged item you can go ahead and {{Insert policy: donate, discard, send back to us, give to a friend, etc}}. 

{{Current agent first name}} 

📚 Recommended reading: Check out our list of essential ecommerce best practices.

Help with product exchanges, returns, and cancellations

According to the National Retail Federation, online purchases have a return rate of 20.8%. That means that many shoppers are writing into support teams to ask for an exchange or return if the online store doesn’t offer a self-serve return portal. 

Having a clear return policy minimizes questions, sets clear expectations before a customer makes an order, and can protect the business from losing too much revenue through returns or exchanges. Your policy should be where shoppers can find it easily: in your FAQ section, in your confirmation emails, and within your order flow. When a shopper requests an exchange or return, these templates can provide you with an effective email support script. 

19) Exchange request after order arrives

There’s a reason returns for online businesses average at 20% versus 9% for retail businesses: customers can’t experience what an item actually looks like, get a sense of its size, or try it on in person. The following two templates help with exchange and return requests. 

Hey there {{Customer first name}}, 

Thanks for reaching out about your recent order {{Number of last order}}. I see that you are interested in a product exchange. We do allow exchanges, and I’m happy to help you with this right away. 

{{Exchange policy and instructions}}

Once you have {{Required action(s)}}, I can process your exchange and get a new {{Product name}} shipped out to you right away. 

Thanks again, 

{{Current agent first name}}

📚Recommended reading: 

• A User-Friendly Guide to Ecommerce Tech Stacks
• 150+ Top Tools for Ecommerce

20) Request for return/refund (item eligible)

Hi {{Customer first name}}, 

Thanks for reaching out! For your order that was delivered on {{Shipping date of last order}}, we’d be happy to process a refund for you. 

To get the return process started, please go to our {{Link to returns portal}} and follow the steps. 

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out. 

{{Current agent first name}}

🤔 Getting too many refund requests? Check out our guide to reducing returns in ecommerce.

21) Request for return/refund (item not eligible) 

Items aren’t always eligible for returns, which can cause tension between a customer and business. Here’s a template for how to handle it. 

Hi {{Customer First Name}},

Thank you for contacting us. Unfortunately, your order {{Number of last order}} is unable to be returned because it is outside of the time window (30 days) outlined in our return policy.

I apologize for any inconvenience that you’ve experienced because of this. 

If there is anything else I can help you with, feel free to reply to this email or visit {{Link to help center}} at any time. 

Thank you again,

{{Current agent first name}}

Angry customer response email templates

The Effortless Experience notes that interactions with support teams are 4x more likely to cause disloyalty in customers rather than loyalty. So, unhappy customers who have had a bad experience expect a quick and kind email response. The following sample emails should help set your team up to support these customers with empathy.

‎22) General frustration with product or experience

This template provides a response for customers who complain about their overall experience with a brand. 

Hi {{Customer first name}},

Thank you for reaching out and letting us know about your experience with us. This is not up to our standard and I've passed this along to our team to ensure this doesn't happen again. 

In addition, I've {{Insert policy: refund, added a credit, send a replacement, etc.}} to make this right. 

We truly value you as a customer and apologize for the inconvenience this caused.

Please let me know if I can help with anything else.

{{Current agent first name}}

💡Tip: Build an escalation process internally to handle extremely frustrated customers who post publicly about a negative experience. This allows agents to refer these customers to a lead or manager for assistance. For very angry customers, using a template is usually not the right move, because their situations tend to vary on a case-by-case basis and require someone with experience to provide the best resolution. 

23) Escalate angry customers to more technical support

Occasionally, one rep might not have the information they need to figure out what went wrong or how to fix it. In that case, you might need to pass a customer onto an agent who has the resources to help. 

Hi {{Customer first name}},

Thank you for reaching out and letting us know about your experience with us. This is not up to our standard and I've passed this along to our team to ensure this doesn't happen again.

I have CC’d {{Technical agent first name}} on this email. They will be able to figure out what happened here and ensure that we resolve this for you. 

{{Current agent first name}} 

Make sales

While customer support emails are not marketing emails, you do have an opportunity to drive sales when having a conversation with a customer. A personal note at the end of a positive customer service experience may be more impactful than a mass email marketing campaign because it’s direct, builds upon any context from the full conversation, and can be adapted for the customer’s exact needs.

While you should never sacrifice quality of support to push a sale, here are some templates you can consider using to gently push customers back to your site for repeat purchases and upsells. 

24) Soft launch a product to a small group of customers 

Drum up hype, test out reception to a new item, establish product market fit, or get valuable feedback from a smaller group of customers before launching a new product to everyone. 

Hey {{Customer first name}}! 

We have been developing {{New product type}} for a long time now, and we can’t wait to release it to the world. Because you’re {{An email subscriber, SMS subscriber, made 5+ purchases, or other criteria}}, we’d like to give you the opportunity to buy this before everyone else can. 

{{Link to purchase page}}

Cheers, 

{{Company name}}

25) Promote sales and time-sensitive deals 

These types of targeted sales can help increase subscribers to different platforms (like social media, email, or SMS). They also create exclusivity and urgency for shoppers, who might jump on an item they’ve been waiting on to get a deal. 

Hey {{Customer first name}}!

Here at {{Company name}} we’re always looking for more and better ways to reach even more people with our exciting lineup of {{Products/services}}.

I’m excited to let you know about a deal that’s only available for {{Email subscribers, SMS subscribers, Instagram followers, etc.}}. 

For the next {{Length of time}}, we’re offering {{Offer details}} on {{Products/services}}.

We stand behind our quality {{Products/services}}, and sales like this don’t come often. That makes now the perfect time to {{Desired action -buy/expand/upgrade/sign up}}!

For starters, check out our {{Popular Sale Item/Service}}, it’s already selling fast!

Best,

{{Current agent first name}}

📚 Recommended reading: Email isn't the only channel to offer discounts and timely deals. Check out our guide to omnichannel customer service to see how you can expand your support and revenue-driving conversations.

26) Convert abandoned carts

With 70% of ecommerce shoppers abandoning their carts, reducing the number of customers who leave items unpurchased can increase your revenue. 

Hey there {{Customer first name}}!

We couldn’t help but notice you stopped by today, and you were this close to making {{Product name}} yours.

In case you were interrupted or pulled away, it’s not too late to buy!

{{Abandoned Cart Link}}

I can even offer you a {{Coupon/special offer}} if you’re ready to buy right now. This link will give you {{Describe the offer or discount}} if you purchase within {{Timeframe}}.

Thanks again for checking out our store! Let me know if I can answer any questions for you.

Best,

{{Current agent first name}}

27) Upsell customers 

Upselling existing customers is less expensive than going out and obtaining new customers for your business. The more purchases returning customers make, the less business have to spend on acquisition costs. 

Hi {{Customer first name}},

Thanks for your recent purchase of {{Product name}} — all of us here at {{Company name}} truly appreciate your business.

I’m reaching out today because I want to make sure you’re getting the most out of that purchase. {{Product name}} is fantastic as a standalone, but it shines when you use it alongside some of our other offerings.

For example, {{Strong explanation of how product/service enhances product they bought}}.

Does this sound like something you’d be interested in? If so, check out {{Product link}} or simply reply to this email.

Best,

{{Current agent first name}}

Collect feedback with these email templates

Customer feedback is powerful data for your business, helping you shape the future direction of your products or services and improve your email open rates. Customers enjoy feeling valued and knowing that you're working to make the product and service experience better and better for them can increase happiness and loyalty.

28) Request customer feedback

This gives customers an open invitation to share how their experience went, so you know what aspects went well and where you can improve. 

{{Customer First Name}},

Thanks so much for your recent purchase. By now, your item should have arrived, and you likely have a good idea of what you think about your purchase.

I’d love to get some feedback from you about your experience so far with us. You can just reply to this email and share your thoughts if you’d like. Even more helpful is if you wouldn’t mind filling out this {{Survey link}}. It shouldn’t take more than {{Estimated completion time}}, and it will help us keep improving as our business grows.

Of course, if you’re having trouble of any kind (or your purchase hasn’t arrived yet), please let me know. I’ll do everything I can to help.

Thanks again for your time!

{{Current agent first name}}

29) Thank customers for their feedback (positive)

Reviews go a long way to build trust in your business. Aside from thanking someone for taking the time to provide positive feedback, it’s a good idea to ask them to write a public review about their experience. 

{{Customer first name}},

Thanks so much for taking the time to give us feedback. We’re always working to improve our products and services, and we’re thrilled when we hear that we’re doing something right. Constructive criticism is great, too, since it helps us improve!

If you’re still feeling the love from your recent purchase, would you mind writing a quick review of your positive experience with us on {{Review site}}? It may not seem like much, but these reviews go a long way.

Thanks again,

{{Current agent first name}}

30) Request feedback from customers who left a negative review

Understanding why someone left a negative review is where, as a support team, you’re going to learn the most. Doing some outreach for customers who left a bad CSAT, NPS score, Yelp or Google review, etc. to see if they are willing to share a bit more information will help you improve the overall experience. 

{{Customer First Name}},

Thanks so much for your feedback on {{Customer survey, review site, etc.}}.

I wanted to check in and get a little more information from you about your experience. This will help our team improve future experiences for you and other shoppers. If you’re open to it, you can just reply to this email and share your thoughts.

Thanks for your time, 

{{Current agent first name}}

📚 Recommended reading: How to Collect Customer Feedback From Support Tickets (+ 8 Other Methods)

Emails that tell customers that they’re chatting with a bot 

31) Tell customers they’re getting an automated email response 

Automated responses can feel impersonal, especially if a shopper is upset. Letting someone know they’re getting an automated response and exactly how to reach a human if they need one can save time for busy teams and get customers a near immediate response. 

{{Customer first name}},

This is an automated response. We are a growing business and, in our best effort to deliver the information you’re looking for as quickly as possible, we do use some automation. 

We think you’re asking about the status of your order and have included information for it below. If you still need support or this didn't answer your question, just respond to this email and a live agent will jump in to help. 

{{Company name}}

Why use email templates for customer support?

Using response templates for your most frequently sent emails means a lower resolution time for customers and higher efficiency for your agents who no longer need to type out each response. For example, the brand Bagallery found that Macros (Gorgias’s version of templates) increased delivery by 3x. 

And templates (for chats and emails alike) don’t have to feel impersonal. While reps might start out with a template, they can personalize templated emails by filling in customer information (like the customer’s name) and important order details (like order tracking numbers). Scroll down to our section on Macros to learn how you can automatically include this kind of personalized information.

Overall, templates create a better, faster experience for everyone. They can:

• Decrease first response time
• Decrease resolution time
• Save time for your customer service team
• Provide an overall better customer experience

Decrease first response time

When customers write in for support, they expect a quick response no matter if they’re giving positive feedback or have an urgent issue they need resolved. By starting first with a pre-written email template, you can fast-track your team’s first-response time, which can lower anxiety in your customers, give them the answers they need, and allow your team to provide a personalized and high-quality experience at scale. 

A pre-written template might provide a response that lets a customer know the team will be with them shortly — but asks the customer several detailed questions upfront so that the agent can get them an answer faster. 

For example, Jetson, an ecommerce company that sells gut-healing probiotics and prebiotics, saw a 60% decrease in first response time by using Macro email templates.

Decrease resolution time 

Your email templates will also be detailed and quality-assured, helping fully resolve customer issues as quickly as possible. For example, templates might include links to a knowledge base or FAQ center that answers lingering questions. Or, you might be able to drop in detailed tracking information if your system allows for dynamic fields. 

Jetson also saw a 30% decrease in resolution time by using templated responses, improving the customer experience and giving the customer service team more time for their highest-value conversations. 

When implementing templates, make sure you’re including all the information the customer needs for a one-touch resolution. Ideally, customers won’t need to respond with follow-up questions. 

📚 Recommended reading: Our Director of Support’s complete guide to measuring and lowering resolution time.

Save time for your customer service team 

If reps start emails from scratch every time, they’ll spend hours each week typing up the same information, lowering efficiency and taking them away from more important projects. Templates raise the number of chats, emails, and SMS tickets agents can handle in a given day. Increasing efficiency without decreasing quality also means you won’t always have to hire new agents to handle more tickets.

In addition, if your team is not able to pull in customer data within the email platform, they’ll have to toggle back and forth to find it. Or worse, they’ll need to go back and forth with the customer to get simple info like their order number or tracking information.

Templates are especially helpful to help agents during customer service training, or to quickly onboard any temporary help you bring on to help during busy periods like Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM).

📚 Recommended reading: Learn how Princess Polly saw a 40% increase in agent productivity after switching to Gorgias and implementing templates and other time-saving features.

Provide an overall better customer experience

The quicker and easier you make the full support experience, you decrease the chance of the customer putting in a high level of effort. The Effortless Experience shows that 96% of customers who have to work hard to get support feel disloyal to the brand after.

🤔 Not convinced yet? Read our post on the importance of customer service to learn why customer service is more closely linked to revenue than you think. 

Why Macros are superior to regular templates

While regular email templates can be helpful in saving time for your support team, setting up automation takes your support one step further. This is possible with a tool like Gorgias, which offers Macros, or specialized templates that pull in data from a Shopify, Magento, or BigCommerce store.

‎Here’s how Macros upgrade your customer support templates:

They help you automatically personalize messages

Macros allow you to pop in variables like customer name, order number, tracking info, or delivery date, and what they ordered, which makes the entire experience feel more personal — even with templates.

Because Gorgias integrates with your ecommerce store, you don’t have to search or ask for customer data (like past order information, reviews left on your site, and so much more). 

‎You can automate follow-up actions

Macros can also be combined with Rules to automatically fire based on certain customer questions and trigger actions, like canceling an order. They can also snooze certain messages that might require a follow-up email so that support agents never leave a conversation without a full resolution. 

‎They include visual product links

When you link a product in a standard template, the customer only sees a URL or hyper-linked text. Plus, agents still have to copy the URL from your store and paste it in the email. But Gorgias’s Shopify product picker lets you search from your product library, select products, and include a visual link that entices customers to click back to your store.  

‎They work across channels

Macros can be used for any channel, not just email, since Gorgias is a centralized helpdesk. You can create shorter variations of your email templates to use for live chat, social media, SMS, and more.

They come with a supported Macros Library 

When you sign up for Gorgias, you’ll get access to a Macros Library, which has pre-made and dynamic templates to help get you started. 

These emails are a starting point for agents to save time and ensure consistency and correctness. Then, agents can further tweak templates based on each customer’s needs.  

You can easily measure template utilization

Gorgias comes with a number of Statistics dashboards that measure important customer support metrics like first-response time, revenue generated from customer support, and much more. The Statistics section includes a Macros tab, which shows you how frequently your agents use each Macro:

‎Customer support leaders can use this tab to understand the effectiveness of each Macro and identify when new Macros are needed.

📚 Recommended reading: Evaluating Customer Service: Why, Challenges, and KPIs That Matter

Create loyal and happy customers from day one with Gorgias

Loyal customers come out of great service experiences. Email templates help create a solid baseline so that teams are more equipped to provide high quality support. By removing the need to type out tedious responses to the same questions, email templates give teams the headstart they need so they can provide fast, personalized responses to repetitive questions and spend more time on higher-value conversations.

Gorgias is a customer service platform built for ecommerce merchants. Features like Macros help you provide personalized, self-service responses to repetitive questions and spend more.

Check out our video below to learn more or read our CX Growth Playbook to learn how to generate consistent revenue from your customer support team. 

{{lead-magnet-2}}

Black Friday — Cyber Monday (BFCM) is the most lucrative opportunity for online stores around the holiday season.

In 2022, nearly 10% of all revenue generated between October 1st and December 31st occurred during the BFCM weekend, according to Adobe.

But just like BFCM sales skyrocket, product returns also surge after the weekend, so much of that extra revenue gets erased.

You can combat Black Friday returns issues in two ways:

1. Reduce the number of returns. This requires accurate product descriptions, timely pre-sales support, and a clear return policy.
2. Streamline the return process. Automations, self-service flows, and other similar tactics can make the return process efficient in terms of costs, time, and man-hours.

In this guide, you’ll learn proven tactics for achieving both of these goals and retaining your BFCM revenue. 

Common reasons why customers return BFCM purchases

ZigZag Global’s proprietary metrics showed a 60% increase in return rates after the Black Friday weekend last year, compared to 2021. Loop Returns puts that number at 31%.

Regardless of the specific numbers, most ecommerce stores face inflated return rates post-BFCM. There are a few common reasons:

1. Shipping delays. Shipping companies are overloaded during the holiday sales rush around Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve. This leads to delays, disappointed customers, and returned items.
2. Damaged products. With so much on their plate, shipping companies often don’t handle items with enough care. If the product packaging doesn’t account for that, items can easily get damaged along the way.
3. Products that don’t match their description. Returns happen when there’s a discrepancy between what customers expect based on your site and marketing campaigns and what they get.
4. Gifts getting returned. Many people do their holiday shopping for Christmas, Hannukkah, and other year-end holidays during BFCM. Plenty of reasons can lead to returns in that context, like wrong sizes, incorrect products, or the recipient not liking the gift in general.

Throughout the following sections, you’ll learn ways to avoid (or at least mitigate) these problems.

How to reduce post-BFCM returns and protect your revenue

While you can’t evade all BFCM returns, you can limit them significantly by following the best practices below.

Plan your BFCM inventory months in advance

A successful BFCM starts way before November. You want to estimate how much inventory you’ll need and order everything at least a few months in advance, depending on how long the shipping process takes for your suppliers.

If you wait too long, you can end up scrambling to secure inventory at times when supply chains are at maximum capability. This can easily lead to shipping delays and returned items.

The best way to estimate how much inventory you’ll need is to use historical data. 

For example, if you use Shopify, you can use your Shopify order history data (or the equivalent in your platform) to filter BFCM orders and compare them to the rest of the year. This will give you a good baseline of how much sales typically jump, so you don’t waste money on inventory you won’t sell and don’t miss out on revenue because of understocking.

Here’s a great guide to BFCM inventory planning, if you need more help. 

Use pre-sales support to educate shoppers

Providing timely pre-sales support is a powerful way to reduce returns because it lets you:

• Point customers to the right products for their needs. That way, there’s less of a chance they return an item because it didn’t meet their expectations.
• Answer common questions about product shipping times, returns, and exchanges in advance. Besides increasing customer satisfaction and reducing returns, this has the added benefit of slashing repetitive customer support tickets down the line.

Gorgias — our ecommerce helpdesk software — has various features that can help you implement this strategy.

For example, Flows are self-service Q&As that live in your chat widget and Help Center. Customers can use Flows to get personalized product recommendations, ask about promotions, and learn about your shipping and returns policies — all of which are great ways to instill buying confidence and nudge shoppers toward a purchase. 

Here’s an example of Flows from Princess Polly, where customers can find the most accurate returns policy for their location without having to talk to an agent. 

For a real-life example of the impact of pre-sales support, check out our case study with skincare brand Topicals. 

They were able to increase sales by 79% and deflect 69% of incoming tickets by educating customers pre-sale thanks to Gorgias’ chat automations.

{{lead-magnet-1}}

Update product descriptions and images

If product descriptions and product photography don’t match what customers receive, high return rates are imminent. 

That’s why it’s a good idea to audit your website a week or two before Black Friday and check if each item’s image and description are accurate. Or, if you don’t have the bandwidth, at least audit the best-selling products and ones that are about to be discounted.

One company that does a great job in this regard is Marine Layer. They offer tons of relevant details under their products, including their exact dimensions, the size of the model wearing the clothes, and more.

Here’s an example from one of their product pages:

This in-depth information helps shoppers make the right choice and helps the brand avoid unnecessary returns down the line.

Test products and packaging before shipping

As I said, broken items are among the most common reasons for returns. You want to ensure all shipments (especially ones containing fragile items) are packaged in a way that can handle more wear and tear than usual.

If you have access to specialized machines like ECT or Mullen testers, you’re probably doing this anyway. But even if you aren't, the process doesn’t have to be complicated. Just package one or two products and throw them around the warehouse a few times to see how they hold up — we did this at a previous company of mine, and it was educational and entertaining. 

Ensure a helpful post-purchase experience

The post-purchase experience begins after a customer completes your checkout process. Making this experience useful for your shoppers will reduce the number of returns and help you create long-term, loyal customers. 

Here are four essential post-purchase best practices to follow:

Send clear order confirmation emails

Good order confirmation emails are a must in terms of lowering shoppers’ post-purchase anxiety and reducing unnecessary tickets to your support team.

Make sure to automate them, so that they’re sent immediately after a customer completes your checkout flow. The email itself should include:

• A verification that the order was received and that your team is working on it
• A description of the products included in the order
• The order’s number and expected delivery date
• What customers should expect next (e.g., a follow-up email when their order is shipped or a phone call to confirm the order)

Make it easy for shoppers to track their orders

Giving customers a way to track their orders is a great way to improve their experience and reduce the load on your support team.

For example, you can use Gorgias’ Order Management Flows to let customers check their order status, package tracking number, and shipping details. This is a great way to keep shoppers informed while deflecting WISMO (“Where is my order?”) requests from becoming support tickets.

Let customers know about shipping delays in advance

Whenever shipping delays can’t be avoided, you want to be upfront about the issue with your customers. 

Tell them when they can expect the delivery and apologize for the inconvenience. You can also throw in a shipping discount or another incentive if you feel it’s necessary to prevent potential returns.

Show new customers how to set up and use your products

These might be instructions on how to apply a skincare product, wash a piece of clothing, or configure a Bluetooth speaker. 

Regardless of the specifics, you want to make sure shoppers have easy access to the necessary information. This will prevent them from returning products just because they couldn’t figure out how to use them.

Note: For even more details and examples, check out our 10 ways to reduce ecommerce product returns.

3 proven ways to streamline the return process

In some cases, it’s not possible to avoid returns altogether. When that happens, you want to ensure the return process is as cost-efficient as possible, so you can avoid wasting customers’ effort, as well as your team’s time and resources.

Here are three ways to do that.

1) Encourage exchanges instead of returns

This option lets you keep at least part of the revenue and profit margins that would’ve otherwise been lost. Plus, it can help you delight customers with products that they might not know about, so it’s a win-win for both sides.

There are two ways to implement this strategy:

Have your customer service agents suggest exchanges

You can instruct your team to approach return requests as opportunities for an exchange. 

If you use Gorgias, your agents can have access to all customer data in one place, so it should be easy for them to suggest relevant products based on each shopper’s previous interactions and purchase history. Plus, with live chat support, your team will be available to customers at every step in the process. 

Using a returns tool like Loop Returns 

Loop is a returns management app that lets ecommerce businesses embed a self-service return portal on their site. 

Besides saving you time (since it’s self-service), the portal can nudge shoppers to exchange their products instead of returning them. This can be done via bonus credits, for example, which give customers more in-store credit than they would get as a refund in the original form of payment.

Jaxxon is one of the ecommerce brands that employ this tactic on their site. They’ve embedded Loop’s return portal, which helps their agents save time and encourages customers to exchange instead of return.

They also provide live chat support (via Gorgias) within the portal to answer questions and potentially steer customers away from a return. For instance, their agents can:

• Prompt users to exchange their item with a better option of returning it
• Explain how the customer can troubleshoot and resolve whatever issue causes them to seek a return
• Help the customer through the returns process, so they have a pleasant experience at the very least

Note: Gorgias and Loop Returns can be integrated. This integration allows customers to talk to a support agent while navigating the returns portal. That way, agents have a chance to troubleshoot any issues that may be causing the return (or steer customers toward an exchange). 

2) Make your returns policy easily accessible

Another challenging aspect of BFCM is the influx of questions to your support team, many of which have to do with returns, like:

• Is there an extended return window for items bought during BFCM? 
• How long will it take for the product to arrive?
• Do you offer free shipping?
• And so on

That’s why you should have your returns policy linked in highly visible places on your website. For example, you could place links to the policy in your site’s navigation or even have a small pop-up that encourages shoppers to read it.

With Gorgias, you can reduce the volume and impact of these repetitive tickets even more by: 

• Using Article Recommendations. With this feature, shoppers can automatically receive an article from your Help Center that answers their question. For example, if they ask about returns or exchanges in your live chat window, they’ll get a succinct answer pulled from your content.

• Setting up Macros. These are pre-made responses (or templates) that dynamically pull in customer information like name or order number. You can include links to your return policy in relevant Macros or even create dedicated Macros for answering specific questions about returns and exchanges — like questions about order status, for example.

Bonus tip: Adjust your return policy if necessary

As mentioned, shoppers often buy Christmas gifts during BFCM. If your return window is 14 or even 30 days, most of the people who receive a gift won’t be able to return it in time.

This can lead to bad reviews, angry shoppers, and poor customer retention (especially for first-time customers). That’s why it’s a good idea to extend your return window after Christmas and New Year to ensure a good customer experience.

3) Enable self-service returns

With self-service returns, online shoppers don’t have to wait for an agent to get to their request, while agents can focus on more complex tickets (or on generating revenue via proactive customer service).

To implement this tactic, you first need to provide shoppers with clear, detailed instructions on how to return their items. These instructions should be included on your site (e.g., on FAQ pages or in helpdesk articles) and can even be printed and shipped alongside the product.

As I said earlier, you can also use Loop Returns to provide shoppers with a self-service return portal on your site. Loop’s portal is easy-to-use, so shoppers can go through it without any unnecessary hassle.

From a revenue protection perspective, you can also have Loop nudge customers toward exchanging items instead of returning them. According to their data, companies that use Loop turn 57% of returns into exchanges.

Use Gorgias to maximize your BFCM revenue

Increases in post-BFCM returns are extremely common and in some cases — inevitable. 

However, with the tactics outlined in this article, you can minimize their number and impact on your revenue. You can also streamline the return process, so you’re not spending unnecessary time, effort, and money on returning items.

Here’s how Gorgias can help you in both regards:

Streamline the return process

Gorgias offers a plethora of features that can reduce the load on your agents during this year’s shopping season rush — from automated responses to self-service flows, and much more. 

Plus, our integration with Loop Returns lets you create a seamless return experience. Shoppers can use the Loop portal for self-service, while also contacting your team if they get stuck (which is a great opportunity to nudge them toward an exchange).

Keep up with multichannel return requests

Gorgias centralizes all customer service tickets in one place. This means your agents don’t have to waste time switching between tabs to handle return requests from your website, email, SMS, and social media profiles, for example. 

Provide pre-sales support and generate more conversions

Your agents can use Gorgias chat campaigns to communicate with customers and help them find the right products for their needs (which helps reduce returns down the line). 

They can even create proactive chat campaigns aimed at specific visitors to promote BFCM discounts, cross-sell or upsell specific items, reduce cart abandonment rates, and much more.

Lastly, you can also check out our Black Friday Marketing Guide for 18 ideas and strategies that can help you drive more Black Friday sales this year.

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While new customer acquisition is always going to be the most important driver of business growth, it’s important to keep existing customers coming back for more. Good customer retention helps brand reputation—which is itself important for new business growth—while making your overall marketing program more efficient. 

Paid social media advertising is one of the most powerful customer retention tools that brands have at their disposal. In this blog, we’ll break down: 

• Why social retention is essential 
• How to build social retention audiences 
• Ways to craft effective retention campaigns 
• How to validate retention success 
• What to avoid when targeting retention audiences 

Let’s get started. 

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The importance of social media in customer retention 

Put simply, if you don’t use social media to stay top-of-mind for your existing customers, your competitors will. Competitor conquesting is a very real part of paid social strategy, and competing brands will always try to woo your existing audience, often with an appealing deal or offer. Retention strategies, in part, are a way to defend your brand from those encroachments. 

On top of that, customers often need a reminder. Even if they love your brand and products, they aren’t going to be thinking about them all the time, so it’s on you to do a little of the lifting for them. It’s important to pop out every now and then to show them what new items you have in stock, or to encourage their next purchase with a great sales offer. 

Lastly, every person’s preferred communication style is different. Not all customers read emails or marketing texts, but social usage is pretty ubiquitous: More than 7 out of 10 American adults use at least one social media platform, with Facebook (68%) and Instagram (47%) being the most popular. That makes paid social a good way to ensure your customers remain aware of your latest and greatest offerings when they’re passively browsing their preferred social apps. 

How much of your budget should go to retention?

Generally speaking, prospecting should always get the majority of your paid social marketing budget. At ADM, we encourage no less than 60%, and often more depending on a brand’s business model. That means retention campaigns should always represent a minority of your budget. 

This is for a number of reasons: One, most businesses can’t survive without constantly restocking their pipeline of new customers. And since it’s much harder to convince an unfamiliar user to make a purchase if they haven’t heard of your brand or enjoyed your products yet, new customers will typically require more touchpoints to produce a conversion—which means more budget. 

Retention campaigns, on the other hand, often work more efficiently. If you’re properly nurturing existing customers by offering perks like exclusive deals and early access to sales, they will keep purchasing. So deciding how big of a majority share your prospecting efforts get compared to retention shouldn’t be solely based on the volume of purchases you can get from each bucket: The cost of driving a purchase from each segment is a deciding factor as well. 

Targeting retention audiences

The march towards a cookieless future has made traditional remarketing less effective on social media. Custom audiences are still useful on Meta and other social platforms, however, which means retention campaigns should rely on first-party data. Your CRM lists, which use first-party data willingly provided by your customers, will be your most important resource—though Pixel-based past purchaser audiences can also be useful for speaking to existing customers who may have purchased more recently. 

The rise of AI-powered campaign types, like Meta’s Advantage+ campaigns, have also changed how marketers approach these audiences. These campaigns use algorithmic insights to deploy different ad creative based on inferences about the user and its own learnings about how different creative performs for different purposes. That makes it possible to utilize “blended” targeting—running prospecting, remarketing, and retention audiences all under the same campaign, provided you have appropriate ad creative options for each audience type in the campaign. 

The most important part of this “new era” is staying on top of the spend allocated to these segments. A strong retention audience can help lift ROAS, but brands still need to monitor where spend is going within those campaigns to ensure it isn’t all gravitating to one customer type. Putting spend caps on a retention audience, or using an existing customer percentage cap in Advantage+, can be good ways to regain some control over your audiences.

Tips for retaining customers on social media

There is no one-size-fits-all strategy for making sure customers come back for more, but there are some best practices to follow to set your retention efforts up for maximum success. Here’s what ADM recommends: 

Upsells/Next step products:

Create targeted ads featuring “next step” products in the customer journey. For example, a running apparel brand might advertise running shoes specifically to existing customers, as these items typically have a higher price point and require more research compared to items like tights or a running bra. 

First looks/early access to new products or releases: 

Utilize custom lists to incentivize first-time purchasers to make a subsequent purchase with a small discount. Offer VIP early access to sales for existing customers with steeper discounts, making them feel valued and encouraging repeat business. 

Special deals for existing customers only:

Target existing customers with exclusive deals on their favorite products in new colors or offer early access to new releases related to previously purchased items. This approach can enhance customer loyalty by making them feel special and appreciated. 

Creative messaging specific to retention audiences:

If it’s a retention ad, users should get the impression you’re inviting them back to buy again. That’s why it’s important to differentiate retention messaging from prospecting, with ideas like: 

• Back In Stock: “We made more of your favorite, get it before it sells out again.” 
• You Asked, We Listened: “You asked for this polo in green, we made it.” 
• Most Requested Feature: “The feature/upsell you’ve all been asking for is now here.” 

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Validating success

Because retention campaigns typically use first-party data, there’s often less guesswork involved when it comes to your results. The user is verifiably tied to the action they undertake, so marketers feel confident that they are accurately reaching existing customers they intend to. 

In order to validate success, it’s best to look at the return on ad spend (ROAS) you’re getting from your retention audiences relative to your prospecting efforts. Since existing customers already have brand affinity, they should be expected to purchase more while requiring a shorter journey from impression to purchase.

That means your retention audience ROAS targets should be as much as double those of prospecting. For example, if a comfortable ROAS for one of our client’s prospecting audiences was 1.5, we would consider targeting a retention ROAS goal closer to 2.5 or 3. 

Customer retention mistakes to avoid 

The only thing as valuable as knowing what to do is knowing what not to do. Here are some of the common customer retention mistakes we have seen around the industry: 

Running Generic Ads: Creating generic ads is the easiest way to lose with any segment. If your messaging isn’t tailored to your audience, it will always fall flat. This is especially true with retention audiences who already loyal customers don’t want to be spoken to like they’re brand new. 

Letting Ads Go Stale: An ad might work great the first time someone sees it. It might still make an impact the fifth or tenth time. But if your same existing customers are receiving the same message repeatedly—and not converting—then fatigue can have a negative impact on performance. Make sure you’re updating retention ads frequently enough that users don’t get annoyed by or immune to your message. 

Inappropriate Spend Split: As mentioned in the budgeting section, the wrong spend split and not tailoring goals to each audience can also be major hindrances to retention performance. It’s important to make sure you’re not neglecting your existing customers by putting too little budget towards them, but since existing customers are finite and new customers aren’t, it’s possible to reach oversaturation and diminishing returns if you put too much budget into those campaigns. 

Bad or Outdated Customer Data: Healthy, accurate customer data is key to ensuring you are reaching the right audiences. Using outdated customer lists for targeting can be a big mistake. When using CRM segments for retention campaigns, make sure you are updating those segments frequently (or using a third-party integration like Klaviyo) to ensure segments update automatically. 

Retaining customers is an art 

As we’ve laid out here, a lot goes into running effective customer retention campaigns on your paid social media. If you’re looking for an expert performance marketing agency that can assist in all facets of your online growth, reach out to our team at Accelerated Digital Media to set up an audit.