Customize Collection Email Campaigns to Enhance Your Cash Flow: Analyze and Drive Results
You’ve carefully created different campaigns based on your campaign audiences and curated just the right language to use in your messages and you’ve made sure that customers on one campaign are excluded from the others. But...you haven’t seen a reduction in your Average Days Collected and customers aren’t responding, or worse, they tell you that you’re contacting them too much. What do you do now?
First, take a deep breath and let’s see what we can see.
Do your campaigns cover your entire customer base, or just a small fraction? Even your most high-touch customers can benefit from receiving a monthly statement or outreach from you and your team. See if there is a way that you can expand your campaign reach.
Are you reaching out at the right time? Review your collection email campaign steps and ensure that you have set up your campaign steps to match the lifecycle of the invoice. If your steps end after 30 days past due, think about how you want to approach a customer when invoices hit an older milestone. Updating your process to address those older invoices, may be the change you need to collect more.
Are you reaching out too much? You’ve sent a friendly reminder 10 days before the invoice is due, you’ve sent a past due notice the day past the due date, and additional emails every week until the invoice has been paid. Whoa, that might be too much. For customers that are consistent payers (although always late), you might want to dial it back just a bit a bit. No matter how many messages you send, they’re not going to pay faster. It’s time to investigate why they are consistently late and work with them to figure out the best payment schedule for both parties.
Are you saying the right thing? We’ve talked about creating your message and keeping your company’s culture in mind, but what about your customer’s culture? Consider refining the language in your collection email templates to be overly thankful for their business or highlight the cool things your company is working on. It might be time to try a different approach like Provation Medical.
Are you emailing when you should be calling? If you have customers that react quickly when you place a quick phone call to remind them to pay, remove them from your email campaign. Using Tesorio Automations, you can create tasks and reminders to pick up the phone and give that customer a call when an invoice reaches a certain age.
Are you finding a lot of disputes or PO errors? This one is a bit harder to solve, but if you start tracking this information using Tesorio Tags, you can begin to see the trends. If you’re seeing the same problems consistently, it may be time to work on your internal processes to address these problems before the first invoice reaches your customer.
Are your messages bouncing? We live in a world full of pop-up blockers and spam filters. If you’re using Tesorio’s Delivery Option to send your campaigns, consider switching to your own company’s email domain. Your customers definitely know you, but they might not yet know Tesorio. Your messages could be getting caught up in spam filters. You may also want to work with your Email Administrator to see if they can see if your outgoing messages are being blocked from your authenticated email account.
Do you need the big guns? If you think that your messages are just being ignored, it may be time to bring in backup. Reach out to the customer’s Sales Rep or Account Manager. Confirm that you have the right contact and that the customer is happy. Unfortunately, you being ignored might not be your fault and it helps to know so that you can work with your internal team to come to a different resolution to collect payment.
Finally, give yourself a break. Just like it took time for you to get used to Tesorio, it will take time for your customers to get used to the change too. Believe it or not, some of our best AR customers found their way to us because their AP departments were receiving Tesorio Campaigns and the AR teams said, “we need that”!
For more on customizing dunning campaigns, have a look at our previous blogs: Step 1: Categorize Your Audience and Step 2: Personalize Your Message