Emails are an essential part of your collection strategy. Crafting effective emails that avoid SPAM filters and are actually opened, read and acted upon by your customers takes a lot of effort. Automated credit and collection solutions can help you overcome collection barriers and increase collections and cash flow with more effective collection emails.

Automated accounts receivable solutions can help you measure and test your collections emails for continued success. Here’s how to measure and test your emails to make sure you succeed.

  • A/B test compares two or more versions of something to see which works better.
  • A/B testing or split testing is a process in which two variants of the same email are shown to different segments of your customers at the same time to determine which variant drives more payments. The variant that results in more payments can be used to help optimize your emails for better results.
  • You can test for:

In an A/B test that HubSpot ran to determine which type of name personalization works best in their subject line, they found that First & Last Name was twice as effective as Last Name Only and nearly four times as effective as First Name Only. Keep in mind that you could get different results because your customer base is different.

  • After you run your email campaign with two different email versions, take a look at the results. There are several categories of results you should examine:
    • The open rate
    • The click-through rate
    • The number of paid invoices once they’re in the portal

Using a tool like SendGrid allows you to do this with open and click-through rates. A good open rate for email is about 15-25% and click through rate is 2.5%. Use these for baseline rates to get started.

  • For calls to action, see how often customers use your portal when it is offered to them. If you want your customers to self-service their payments more often, consider A/B testing your calls to action to take them to the portal.

Reviewing, testing and improving your emails to increase their effectiveness at grabbing your customers attention and prompting action to pay past due invoices is a continuous process. Automated credit and collection solutions can help you refine this process to increase collections and cash flow.

Lockstep Collect, a leader in cloud-based credit and collection solutions, provides automated solutions for managing credit and collections. Lockstep Collect is an experienced software partner that can help you maximize your collections and cash flow in the new normal.

If you would like to learn more about how you can benefit from automated credit and collection solutions, please contact Lockstep Collect at www.lockstep.io.