The FAQ email campaign: send the answers support keeps repeating

Your support inbox has already written this campaign

There's no research to do here. Export three months of support tickets, sort by subject, and the top five recurring questions are your next five campaigns. They're already in the customer's own words, and that's the phrasing to keep.

Add two more sources if you've got them. Live chat transcripts are the most honest, because people type things there they'd never put in an email. Your site search log shows what people went looking for and didn't find.

Answer the questions that stop a purchase, not the ones about orders

Support questions come in two kinds and only one belongs in a campaign. Where is my order is an operations problem. Will this fit through a letterbox is a sales problem, and that's the one worth sending.

Four to six questions is the right length. Go beyond that and it becomes a help centre, and your reader stops treating any single answer as important.

Answer properly, including the awkward part

The failure here is the answer that's technically true and dodges the point. If the honest answer is that the product doesn't suit a particular use, say so. They'll find out anyway, and a return costs you more than a lost sale.

• Give the direct answer in the first sentence, then the detail
• Use the words the customer used, not the internal term for the same thing
• Include the exception, because the exception is where support spends its life
• Link to the page that goes deeper, for anybody who wants it
• Give a real reply address for the question you didn't cover

Answers written that way get a second life. They belong on the product page, in the abandonment sequence and in whatever structured markup your site publishes. Few campaigns pay on the site as well as in the inbox.

Three shapes, depending on how many questions you have

The list of five is the default and it's fine. Two other shapes usually do better. One question answered at length reads as an article and gets forwarded. A question from a named customer, answered by a named member of staff, reads as a conversation and gets replies.

Whichever shape you pick, invite the question you haven't answered. It costs nothing, it writes your next campaign, and the replies are the most useful research marketing will get all quarter.

Judge it on the tickets that stop arriving

The campaign report will show a decent open rate and a dull revenue line, and neither is the number that matters. Count how often the question you answered turns up in support in the month after, against the month before.

If it halves, the campaign paid for itself twice: once in the orders it unblocked, once in the time it handed back. That second saving never appears in any email report, which is why this format is chronically undervalued.

Ask your support team for their most annoying question

Whoever answers your emails can name it without looking anything up. That question, answered honestly and sent to the whole list, is campaign one. Campaign two is whatever they name when you ask again a fortnight later.

Then check whether the answer appears on the product page. Usually it doesn't, or it's buried in a tab, and moving it up the page is worth more than the email was. The two together are the fix. Either on its own is half of one.