For most companies, using an email response management software isn't just nice to have — it's essential.

When workload grows, most companies realize that important emails slip by unanswered and the response times need to be managed to optimize your team’s efficiency, conversion rates and increase revenue.

If you're looking for the perfect email response management software for your team, here's everything you need to know.

What's an Email Response Management Software?

An Email Response Management Software (let’s call it ERMS from now on!) is a tool that helps companies manage and monitor their email activity at a glance, empowering team members to always respond on time and make sure no important email slips through the cracks.

Companies typically use an ERMS to help their team move faster and reduce response times, instead of drowning in emails. At the same time, they give managers powerful tools to manage and monitor their teams’ email activity.

What are the benefits of an Email Response Management Software?

Now you know what an email response management software does. But do you need one? Why do teams use it?

In most cases, an email response management software will save time and help your employees do their work more efficiently. The actual benefits will depend on the way your team uses email, but every company sees positive change when using one.

Here are a few ways an ERMS helps your team take charge of their work.

Closing more deals, increasing revenue

No matter what your strategies for generating leads look like, chances are you're using email to communicate with potential customers once they enter your sales process.

According to a study published by Lead Response Management, the odds of closing a sale are 21 times greater when leads are contacted within 5 minutes versus 30 minutes after they reached out.

Still, responsiveness is one of the metrics that is not being tracked by most sales teams. An ERMS will help your team make sure all leads are answered as quickly as possible.

Imagine the impact that multiplying sales could have on your company, just by answering quicker!

Improving customer satisfaction

A study conducted by Microsoft shows that 61% of customers stop buying from a company due to poor customer service. When you manage thousands of customer service emails, it’s hard to make sure everyone gets the attention they need.

If you’re slower than your customers expect, you’ll be creating a negative experience that might lead them to leave for the competition.

Investing in an ERMS is a great option to provide customers with a five-star experience. You’ll be able to monitor responsiveness and set up alerts to hit your response time goals. Most softwares will also show you how many emails you receive hour-by-hour for each day of the week, so you can make sure you’re staffed appropriately for your busiest times.

Understand how work is getting done

As a manager, it’s hard to get insight into your team’s work when you can’t see how it’s happening. This makes it impossible to help everyone improve their work.

Even if you’re reviewing your team’s inbox a few times a day, most email providers only give simple information on how many emails are sent and received by the whole team. Managers should spend their valuable time helping their team hit their goals, and not finding data.

An EMRS aggregates all the relevant metrics on your team’s email usage so you can measure performance metrics. Managers can easily monitor conversations, keep an eye on global and individual workload and stay in the loop of progress.

Which features do you need to look for?

You want an Email Response Management Software, but you’re not sure which one is right for your team. Let’s walk through the essential features you need to look for when you’re choosing a solution.

Wide-range of metrics

This one is probably obvious, but you need a feature-rich software that is able to give you the exact metrics you need to analyze your team’s productivity.

Enterprise-grade security

You have to be extremely careful about security when dealing with customer information. Even the smallest breach can break trust between you and your clients. That’s why you need a software that complies with enterprise-level standards like GDPR, CCPA, and ISO/SOC 2 Certifications.

If you’re using G Suite, you’d want to look for Verified by Google software. To get it, companies need to pass rigorous audits that include pentests, deployment reviews and policy and procedure reviews.

Scalability

If you expect your team or company to grow in the short future, it’s important to consider the scalability of the software to avoid switching tools again in the future, which can be time consuming and expensive.

We discourage choosing options that charge by the message volume you receive, as the costs can be difficult to predict. If possible, go for an option that charges per user, or preferably one that offers unlimited usage.

Data export

The most successful companies rely on structured data to make business decisions.

If your email response management system can integrate with the applications your Business Intelligence Team is already using, it can help break down silos.

That’s why it’s important that the software you use lets you export your data to a widely-used format like CSV.

Easy-to-understand interface

Graphics, tables… we know statistics can quickly get complex and difficult to understand. Before committing to any solution, it’s important to make sure it’ll be easy for your team to use.

An email response management solution should help you move faster, so look for options with a clean and intuitive interface that makes interpreting data quick and easy.

Email Meter: the #1 email response management solution

Email Meter is the perfect email response management software solution for companies using G Suite, now Google Workspace.

Our software is a feature-rich solution that helps companies understand and monitor their email activity at a glance. It gives actionable insights on performance as well as productivity metrics such as workload, SLAs and response times.

We provide one of the most advanced analytics dashboards in the industry, being able to customize anything, from KPIs to connecting with third party sources.

You can schedule reports with the most important metrics for your team and have them delivered straight to your inbox, so you’re always up to date.

Email Meter gives you the understanding you need to optimize your team’s time, work more efficiently and support your customers better.

The most common problems solved by Email Meter

Every team uses email in a different way, and that comes with unique issues.

Here’s a few examples of problems that Email Meter has solved for some of our clients. Do any of them resonate with you?

‍How can we make sure customers are answered on time?

‍There’s a good chance you have no clue on how long your customers wait for an answer once they contact you.

Email Meter gives you clear metrics on your team’s response times. When you know how your team is doing, you can set goals to work more efficiently, or celebrate if you’re already doing great!

How can we know our busiest times?

Email Meter gives you an easy-to-understand heatmap to see when your team sends and receives more messages.

If you discover you’re receiving lots of emails in the middle of the night, you can use that information to hire employees in different time zones.

How can we measure efficiency?

Every team has measurable goals to hit. But when a member is struggling to perform, this can be a problem for everyone.

Email Meter allows managers to measure both team and individual performance, tracking metrics like average response time, email volume thread length and more. These insights help you see who’s excelling at their job, and who might need a little extra help.

How can I prove SLAs to my customers?

If you work with a customer-facing team, you probably have some sort of contractual SLAs (Service Level Agreements) with your clients. Email Meter makes it easy for businesses to quickly monitor and report their SLA’s with each customer.

At the moment we’re working on an alerting system to prevent SLA breaches before they happen.

How well are we solving customer questions?

While quick replies are key to delivering a five-star customer experience, you also want to make sure that the quality of the responses is high enough to solve customer issues without engaging in too much back-and-forth.

With Email Meter you can track how many customer requests are answered with your first response. If lots of emails have long threads, you can dig deep into the data to see why that’s happening, and take action.

Wrapping up

We think Email Meter is the most powerful email response management software available, and the best way for you to check it is to book a quick demo where one of our experts will walk you through our capabilities, and provide you options to customize the tool for your unique needs.

The more you empower your team with the best tools, the easier it will be for everyone to succeed. With Email Meter, your team can go above and beyond to continue creating value for your business, become more efficient, reduce response times, increase conversion rates and increase revenue!