A knowledge base that answers what your inbox keeps asking
A library of plain answers: delivery, returns, sizing, how to use the thing. Customers use it to help themselves. Your emails can use it to help them sooner.
- 070Knowledge Base
- A centralised repository of information, guides, and resources that help customers and employees find answers to common questions.
- Written from
- The questions customer service answers every week
- Lives on
- Your own site, or a help centre linked from it
- Best used in
- Order, shipping and post-purchase emails, when the question comes up
Write the answers your support inbox keeps typing
Don't start with a template full of empty categories. Start with the replies your team writes over and over: delivery times, returns, sizing, ingredients, how to pause a subscription. If a question comes in every week, it's earned an article.
- One question per article, answered in the first line
- Worded the way customers ask it, not the way your team files it
- Checked whenever a policy, a carrier or a product changes
- Searchable, and linked from the footer of every page
Plain answers help in search too. The questions customers ask you are the ones they type into Google and into AI assistants, and a clear answer on your own site is what you want them to find. That's part of what ecommerce SEO is for.
Put the right help article in the right email
| The email | The article to link |
|---|---|
| Order confirmation | Delivery times, and how to change the address |
| Shipping confirmation | What to do if tracking stalls |
| Delivered | How to use it, and how to look after it |
| Subscription reminder | How to skip, swap or pause |
| Return started | How refunds work, and how long they take |
Some of the most useful post-purchase emails are help articles sent at the moment they're needed. A care instructions email is exactly that: on time, useful, and not a discount in sight.
The internal knowledge base nobody writes until someone leaves
There's a second knowledge base, for your own team. Discount rules, tone of voice, what each flow does and why, which segments matter, who owns which app. It lives in someone's head until the day they hand in their notice.
Write it down while things are calm. You'll want it the day you bring in an agency or let one go, and it's the first thing a decent outsourcing handover should ask for.
Related terms
FAQs
What is the difference between a knowledge base and an FAQ page?
An FAQ page is one list of short answers. A knowledge base is a set of articles grouped by topic, each long enough to actually solve the problem, with a search box on top. Start with the FAQ page, and split it into a knowledge base once the answers stop fitting in a paragraph.
Should our knowledge base sit on our own domain?
Ideally, yes. Help desk tools often host it on a subdomain, which works fine as long as it carries your branding, your footer links to it and your emails link straight to the right article. What matters most is that the customer finds the answer without opening a ticket.
How do we know which help articles to write next?
Read your support inbox and the replies to your marketing emails. Tag each question for a month, and write the article for whichever tag keeps growing. Then check your help centre's search box: searches that return nothing are a to-do list somebody has already written for you.
Rather we explained it on your own account?
Bring your Klaviyo account to a growth consultation. We'll walk through what this means for your numbers, in plain English, and what we'd fix first.
Half an hour with Theo, our founder.
We're all about relationships built on trust, mutual respect and a shared vision for success. If that sounds like your vibe, let's make some waves together 🌊
