At the end of November, the owner of a small pool service company sits down with his end-of-season email report. The numbers look good. A large share of his customers seem to have opened his “Thanks for a great summer” email. He feels pleased for about a minute.
Then he scrolls to his inbox. Three customers wrote back. One thanked his technician by name for spotting a cracked skimmer basket in August. One asked whether the company could help with a leak next spring. One said her father, who loved swimming in their pool every morning, had passed away in October, and she wasn’t sure whether they’d open the pool next year.
None of those replies appeared in the open rate. All of them mattered more.
This is the last Marketing Platform post of November, and it comes with one simple tip for better relationships: at the end of each month, read the replies, not the opens. This post follows an invented pool service company to show what that looks like. The company, its people, and its customers are illustrative, not a client story, and nothing here describes a real result.
Our invented company is a family-owned residential pool service business run by an owner we’ll call Andre, with a handful of technicians. It opens pools in the spring, maintains them weekly through the summer, and closes them in the fall. By late November, the pools are covered, the trucks are mostly parked, and Andre finally has time to think about the year.
His customers are homeowners he sees every week for months, then not at all for half a year. That rhythm makes relationships both easy and fragile. During the season, technicians know every gate code, dog, and garden bed. In the off-season, the connection can quietly fade.
Open rates are one of the most familiar numbers in email marketing, and they can be useful for spotting big problems, like an email that never arrived. But they’re a poor measure of a relationship.
There are practical reasons, too. The WeKinnect Marketing Platform’s own campaign documentation warns that opens and clicks can be recorded by email clients and security scanners, not only by people. So a high open count doesn’t necessarily mean a lot of people read the message.
Some email apps also limit what senders can see. Apple explains that its Mail Privacy Protection feature, when turned on, hides a person’s IP address and prevents senders from seeing whether they opened an email. That’s a reasonable privacy choice for readers, and it means open data is incomplete by design.
None of this makes email reports useless. Delivery, bounce, and unsubscribe numbers still tell a business something. But if you want to understand how people feel about you, the most honest signal is what they actually say.
Andre doesn’t throw his email report away. It still answers a few useful, practical questions about his list.
Depending on your edition and setup, the platform’s campaign reports show recipients, deliveries, bounces, unsubscribes, link activity, and contact-level engagement on the CRM record, along with opens and click-to-open rates. Andre uses those numbers for housekeeping:
What he stops doing is treating opens as a measure of how people feel. For that, he reads.
A reply is a person choosing to talk to you. It might be a thank-you, a question, a complaint, or a piece of news. Whatever it is, it’s an invitation to respond.
Research on gratitude suggests that how you respond to people who reach out can matter. In a study published in Emotion, Sara Algoe, Barbara Fredrickson, and Shelly Gable had members of romantic couples express gratitude to each other in a lab. They found that when the person being thanked saw the thanker as more responsive after the conversation, the couple’s relationship quality improved over the following six months.
That study was about couples, not customers, and it doesn’t predict any business result. But the idea is worth carrying into business: when someone reaches out, especially to say thanks, the way you respond shows whether you were really listening.
Here’s the habit Andre adopts. On the last weekday of each month, he sets aside about half an hour to read every reply and message from customers that came in that month. Not the report. The words.
He does four things with each one:
That’s it. It’s not a campaign or an automation. It’s a habit of paying attention, and it fits into the last half hour of a quiet Friday afternoon.
Before this habit, Andre’s customer messages were scattered: emails in his inbox, texts on his technicians’ phones, a few Facebook messages, and voicemails. It was easy for a message to slip through, especially in the off-season.
Depending on your edition and how your account is set up, the WeKinnect Marketing Platform can bring phone, SMS, web chat, email, Facebook, and Instagram messages into one shared inbox, with handoff to team members. That makes a month-end reply review possible: one place to see what customers said.
A few cautions. SMS through the platform is available in the US and Canada, and US businesses must complete a carrier registration process for business texting before sending. And which channels are included depends on the edition, so it’s worth confirming what you have.
The second step, writing a short note, is what turns a reply into a relationship.
The platform’s CRM holds contacts with names, email addresses, phone numbers, and tags, along with tasks. Depending on your edition and setup, notes can be added to a contact’s activity timeline, including through an automation step, so the next person who looks at the record can see what happened.
Andre keeps his notes short and useful:
The last note is the kind of thing that protects a relationship. Without it, the customer might get a cheerful “Time to open your pool!” email in March. With it, she gets a phone call from someone who remembers.
When a customer thanks a technician, Andre makes sure the technician hears about it, along with the customer’s exact words if the customer doesn’t mind. Then he replies to the customer: “Thank you for telling us. I shared your note with Luis, and it made his week.”
That’s a small loop of gratitude: a customer thanks the company, the company thanks the customer for saying so, and the technician feels seen.
Andre doesn’t turn these replies into testimonials. A private thank-you is private. If he ever wanted to quote one publicly, he’d ask first and get clear permission.
The reply about the customer’s father is the one Andre thinks about longest. He knows a template won’t do.
He writes back himself, slowly. Here’s an illustrative example of what he might say, written for this post, not a real message:
“I’m so sorry about your father. Our team will always remember him waving from the deck on Tuesday mornings. Please don’t worry about next season. There’s no need to decide anything now, and we won’t send any reminders. If and when you’d like to talk, just call me directly.”
It’s short. It names something specific. It removes pressure. And it gives her a direct line to a person.
Then he writes the note on her record, so nobody on the team accidentally sends a spring reminder. That’s the platform helping with the part it’s good at: remembering. The kindness is still his.
Some businesses read this tip and think, “But nobody replies to our emails.” That’s worth looking at.
People reply more when an email feels like it came from a person. Andre made a few changes to his own messages:
He doesn’t ask for replies in a pushy way, and he doesn’t promise anything in exchange. He simply makes it clear that a person is on the other end and would be glad to hear from them.
At the first team meeting of each month, Andre spends five minutes on the reply review. He reads a few thank-yous aloud, with names of technicians who earned them. He mentions any pattern, like several questions about the same issue. And he asks whether anyone has heard something from a customer that should be written down.
Technicians often know things the inbox doesn’t. One mentions that a longtime customer is selling her house. Another says a customer’s new puppy keeps getting out through the gate. Those details go into notes, too, so the whole team can serve people well.
The third step, creating a task, is what keeps promises from being forgotten.
When the customer asked about the leak, Andre’s reply said, “We’ll take a look in early spring.” That’s a promise. So he creates a task for March, assigned to himself, with a short description. Depending on your edition and setup, tasks live in the CRM alongside contacts, which helps the team see what’s coming.
In March, when the task comes up, he calls her. The leak turns out to be minor. The customer, in our illustrative story, remembers that he remembered.
Some parts of this habit could be automated, and some shouldn’t be.
It might be reasonable to automate a confirmation that a message was received, or a note when a form is submitted. But the reply review itself, reading what people said and deciding how to respond, is a human job. So is writing anything in response to grief, a complaint, or a personal thank-you.
Andre also keeps thank-yous and review requests separate. A customer who writes to thank a technician gets a thank-you back, not a request to post a review. Mixing the two can make the thanks feel like it was only a step toward something else.
A pool service company’s records can include sensitive things: gate codes, alarm details, notes about when people are away, and sometimes personal news. Andre sets a few rules:
This is practical general guidance, not legal advice. Businesses should follow any privacy requirements that apply to them.
A reply review is simple, but a few habits can undercut it:
Reading only the happy messages. It’s tempting to skim the complaints. They’re often the most useful messages of the month, and the people who wrote them deserve a thoughtful answer.
Replying with a template. A quick, warm, personal reply beats a polished form letter. If you use a starting draft, rewrite it so it sounds like you and mentions what the person actually said.
Writing notes nobody can use. “Customer called” doesn’t help anyone. “Asked about winter cover damage. Sent photos. Wants a call back in January” does.
Making promises without tasks. If you say “we’ll look at it in spring,” write it down where it will come back to you.
Letting the review grow. Thirty minutes is enough for most small businesses. If it takes much longer, that’s a sign messages are piling up during the month and need a quicker daily check.
Turning it into a sales review. The goal is to listen and follow through, not to find people to sell to. If a customer asks for something, help them. If they don’t, let the relationship simply be a relationship.
For a seasonal business, the months when nothing is happening can be the best time to strengthen relationships.
Andre uses the winter gently:
None of these are aggressive. They’re simply ways of staying connected when the trucks are parked.
After a few months of reply reviews, Andre notices patterns he’d never seen in his reports.
Customers thank technicians by name more often than he’d realized. A few questions come up again and again, like when to schedule spring openings and how to handle a green pool after a storm. Some customers only reply when something’s wrong, which tells him where service could improve.
None of these patterns are numbers he can put on a chart. But they’re the clearest picture he’s ever had of what his customers appreciate and what they need.
If you’d like to try a reply review, here’s a gentle starting list:
You can glance at your email report afterward. Just don’t let it replace the reading. The report tells you what happened to your messages. The replies tell you what happened to your relationships, and those are the ones worth building on next month.
The same idea works for a very different kind of organization. Imagine a county 4-H club wrapping up its year after the fair.
Its emails to families might report decent open numbers, but the real signal would be in replies: a parent thanking a volunteer leader for helping a nervous kid show a calf, a question about next year’s projects, a note that a family is moving away.
A volunteer leader could read those replies once a month, thank people personally, write down anything the next leader should know, and make sure promises get kept. The club wouldn’t need a big system to do this. It would need a place where messages come together and someone who reads them.
And it would be especially careful with privacy, since many members are children. Any story or photo shared publicly would need a parent’s permission.
Andre’s November email report still sits in a folder. He looks at it once in a while. But the thing he remembers from the month is the customer who wrote about her father, and the note on her record that will keep a cheerful spring reminder from landing at the wrong time.
That’s the tip for wrapping up the month, and maybe the year: the best measure of a relationship isn’t whether someone opened your email. It’s whether, when they wrote back, someone was listening.
If you’d like help setting up one place for customer messages and a simple month-end habit for reading them, start a conversation with WeKinnect.
Photo by Jason Briscoe on Unsplash
Written By
Hollis Bennett writes for WeKinnect Global Branding Agency on Reputation Management and the Marketing Platform. Guided by the core value of Service before Self, Hollis writes for entrepreneurs and family-owned legacy businesses. WeKinnect serves clients across restaurants, arts, travel and tourism, banking, home services, nonprofits, and the pet industry. In every piece on reputation and the marketing platform, Hollis keeps Service before Self at the heart of the work.
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