Blog: Email
Loyalty Marketing with Reorder Reminders now available
October 30, 2017Re-order reminders. Followup emails. Surveys. Stay in touch with your customers and create repeat business with our new Loyalty Marketing feature:
Loyalty marketing emails allow you to schedule a sequence of automated emails after an important event (either registration or placing an order). Some examples of loyalty marketing emails:
1. Asking a customer for feedback or a review after they’ve received an order.
2. Reminding a customer that it’s time to re-order – even six months or a year after the order
3. Following up with a user after initial registration to see if they need help with product selection.
Loyalty marketing is easy to use; just pick the trigger (order or registration); the delay (hours or days); and create your message. You can even show the customer what they ordered the first time!
Loyalty marketing is available in your store today – just look for Loyalty Marketing in your dashboard menu. Need help setting up a campaign? Just drop us a line and we’ll be happy to help!
Email Service Improvements and Tips
June 19, 2017
As you know, email spam is a constant problem for anyone doing business online. Symantec’s current figures show over 14 billion spam messages per day, and the problem continues to get worse. For you, that means that there is an ever-increasing likelihood that critical messages like order acknowledgments or registration confirmations might not make it to you or your customer.
Since most of our company stores, distributor websites and supplier sites send out transactional email (messages related to an e-commerce transaction of some sort), we’re constantly on the lookout for email deliverability issues. Recently, we began the process of upgrading our email services to ensure that every single message gets through to its intended recipients. This includes tools that provide much better insight into what happens to messages once they get sent out. Put simply, we now have the ability to not just track emails all the way to their recipients, but also to find out where they run into problems along the way.
We expect that these improvements will result in far fewer problems with email delivery. But nothing is perfect, so we’d also like to offer some tips for troubleshooting email problems. These apply to both you and your customers, so feel free to pass them along!
1. Check your spam folder
Sure, this is the oldest tip in the book, but you’d be surprised how often people forget it! All sorts of strange factors can trigger spam flags on legitimate messages, from specific types of language to the excessive use of exclamation points. A sender that normally makes it into your inbox shouldn’t usually be flagged because of this, but it happens periodically.
Most email clients have a clearly visible “Spam” or “Junk” folder, so if your sender’s message wound up in there, it’s important to both move the message to your inbox and make sure that you click any “Not Spam” or “Not Junk” buttons that your email client displays on the message. That will help ensure (though nothing is foolproof) that the sender doesn’t get sent into spam purgatory again.
2. Check other automated folders
Many email clients now try to organize your messages for you to help you sort through the mass of email and determine what to look at first. Google’s Gmail now groups messages into four tabs: Inbox, Social, Promotions and Updates. Other emails clients now offer similar automated rules to put lower-priority messages in secondary tabs or folders, or allow you to designate “VIP” senders for special treatment.
These are all wonderful features, but they can often lead to confusion when a sender that normally gets placed into one bucket somehow winds up in a different one. Before you hit the panic button, make sure you check all your automated tabs and/or folders to make sure something didn’t trigger the message being sent to the wrong place. You still received it, just not where you were expecting
3. “Whitelist” the sender
Whitelisting is the process of telling your email client or email host that a given sender (or domain) is authorized to send you email. Think of it like making a guest list for your party and handing it to a doorman. The doorman (in this case, your email client or your email service provider) asks the sender if they are on the guest list; if they are, they’re allowed in, no matter how ugly their outfit or how cheap the bottle of wine they brought with them.
Whitelisting can be done in a variety of ways, but it’s most reliable when it’s done by your email provider. Check with them to see what options they offer; many email providers have a web interface for handling things like whitelisting and forwarding.
Tried all these and still having email issues? Give us a shout!
Categories: How-to
Tags: company stores e-commerce Email spam webspam
Company Stores 101: Customizing Email Templates
March 21, 2017Many storeBlox CS store owners don’t realize that each email that your store sends out – registrations, order notifications, requests and so on – is completely customizable, right in the dashboard. Don’t like the ones that come with your store? Toss them out and make your own!
Not only is each email completely customizable with our WYSIWYG editor (so you can format, add colors, tables, graphics, etc.), but we’ve also provided you with some dynamic fields that fill in automatically with information from the store, order or account. These fields are available for both the subject line of the email and the body of the email itself.
This provides a wide range of possibilities for customized messages, offers, loyalty marketing and more. Some examples:
Registration offers: Want more users to register for your site (so you can add them to your email marketing, for instance)? Create an incentive for registration, like a discount code. Add this code to the **User Registration** email and you’ve got a custom offer (using their name, of course!) for every user
Return Actions: One of the biggest challenges with online stores is encouraging repeat visits. The first order is great, but you really want to gain long-term, repeat customers whenever possible. By adding personalized messages to the Customer Confirmation email to encourage specific actions, you can create a “curiosity gap” that brings customers back after their order:
Encourage Feedback: One of the most difficult things to obtain from your company store customers is constructive feedback about your products and services. Most of us hate filling out surveys (unless we’re really mad about something), but the best time to get feedback from someone is when they’re directly interacting with you or immediately afterward. By adding a survey link to your Shipment Confirmation email, you can catch customers when they are most likely to be paying attention – when they get that shipment notification
These are just a few uses of email customization. It’s a nifty feature that everyone should use — after all, these are emails that customers are more likely to pay attention to. Take advantage of it!
