Another edition of the “How to Handle Email” series for your business, your life and for overall reduction of insanity caused by flooded inboxes. In this edition, I want to discuss complaints or questions about retrieving information products or things that you sell that are of the digital nature. That is almost 100% of my product in question there. Digital product, mp3, pdfs, ebooks, videos, you name it.
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Every once in awhile there’s an issue with the system or the payment processing path or the user’s computer or just the instructions, and that’s kind of the approach you need to take when you’re dealing with these emails. Not “Oh my goodness, this is so easy, I made it as simple as possible, why are you having a hard time with this?”
Instead, come up with the 4 or 5 biggest thing that could go wrong if an 8 year-old was trying to do it. I’m not saying you should think your customers, clients, visitors, viewers or people as being on par with 8th graders. There’s nothing wrong with that, I’m just saying that it’s the typically average recommended reading level for widely spread and easily understandable content, whether that’s articles or books or stuff on the web and you should aim for simplicity when it comes to instructions.
You have something inside called “The Curse of Knowledge.” You already know how to upload the product. You wrote the product, you put it up there, you know how to download it, you know how that system works. You’ve been through it, so explaining it to someone won’t be as detailed as it would be for most people because you already know the little steps that you’re doing automatically but maybe aren’t explaining to the fullest, and some people need that.
Granted you can’t think about every possible solution or problem that could come up as it goes along. However, if you keep the emails or the questions as they come along, after a couple of months or a year, you’ll have a really good understanding of the common issues that come up and can create an FAQ page with all of those answered, or put it in a readme file in the same .zip file the person downloads with it. At the very least, have canned responses that you copy and paste when those emails come up.
All of these things are so you can do the work and the research up front and give your customers, your visitors a response that’s adequate while saving you some time. There’s the general path for handling product retrieval issues and general customer problems that could come up. Your inbox is potentially smaller now and I hope you have a great time improving your business and online efforts.