Improving Accounts Receivable Collections with Automated Email

Optimizing accounts receivable collections is an ongoing process. It’s your job to find ways to make A/R collections easier and more efficient. For many businesses, one solution to a better collections process is automated email. Automated emails can quickly improve your accounts receivable collections, especially if you’ve always sent collection emails manually.

Is your accounts receivable email game missing a few pieces? Learn how you can improve collections with automated emails.

How Automated Emails Improve A/R Collections

For accounts receivable professionals, automation means less time and resources spent on menial (but absolutely necessary) collections tasks. 

Traditionally, collection emails required accounts receivable persons to manually input invoice number, total payment amount, primary contact information, and more. For larger businesses with an ever-growing list of clients, manual collection email creation just isn’t practical.

A/R email automation handles all the important data input tasks quickly and efficiently. What’s more, most email automation software makes it easy to segment clients into groups and send appropriate emails at different times during the collection process. 

Accounts receivable email automation is ideal for:

• Dunning emails – Dunning emails are sent to clients to remind them of overdue payments. Automating dunning emails means no more tracking overdue invoices manually.
• Invoice emails – Automated emails with invoices and purchase orders attached means one less step you must take to ensure payment.
• Payment reminders emails – Payment reminder emails to clients help your customers sort and settle invoices before they’re overdue. Automating these reminder emails creates less work for your accounts receivable team and simplifies the process for both your company and the client. 
• Welcome emails – Automating accounts receivable emails frees time to create personalized, automated welcome emails you can send to new customers every month.

Collection emails are a crucial part of any company’s operations, and they are especially important to accounts receivable. They have to be sent, but they don’t have to be sent manually. 

Stop wasting time having your people send emails. That time could be better spent focusing on more important accounts receivable tasks and customer service opportunities.

Tips for Creating Automated A/R Collections Emails

According to this study, triggered emails—emails sent automatically when they were “triggered” by a customer action—had a 76.7% higher open rate than business-as-usual emails. That’s huge! 

It’s in your best interest to follow automated A/R email best practices if you want to capitalize on those higher open rates. Many companies find a trusted accounts receivable collections platform and work from there.

Here are three essential tips for creating automated A/R collections emails:

1. Build Reusable Email Templates

The first step in any successful automated A/R email campaign is to create reusable email templates for common collections emails (collect payment emails, dunning emails, payment reminder emails, welcome emails…)

Take your email efficiency one step further by creating templates for different scenarios such as 30-day, 45-day, or 90-day email reminders. 

2. Refine Your Collections Email Process

With more time freed up by automated emails, you can focus on improving your collections email process. One email may have taken all day to send to multiple clients manually. Automation sends a welcome email, a reminder, a past due notice, a second reminder and even a prompt informing the client of a follow-up phone call.

3. Automate Emails to Trigger When Appropriate

Most A/R email automation platforms let you define email triggers based on all kinds of customer criteria. From the first follow-up point-of-contact (the welcome email) to the last point-of-contact overdue reminder email), automated email triggers help keep your business top-of-mind.

It’s a good idea to automate email sending whenever customer contact would facilitate faster collection.

Never again worry about forgetting to attach an invoice or sending a payment reminder notice. Automated email campaigns for accounts receivable improves overall A/R success by saving time and money. This, in turn, improves the overall customer experience. Ready to try it yourself? Contact us today!

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