Using your store email effectively

Published on June 06, 2012 Using your store email effectively

Your online store software is more than just a website that you can sell things with, it’s a complete online business tool that has many capabilities beyond just presenting products to the world and waiting for people to come and shop.

If used cleverly, email can be a powerful business tool to help you build your online brand and grow your business. Here’s how.

Email on your domain name

It’s surprising how some many established businesses online and offline still use email addresses at their ISP as their main business email address. The problems with this approach are as follows:

• If you change your ISP you will lose your email address and with it potential enquiries
• You will have to go to all of the online directories and other places where you have listed your email address and get them changed (a time consuming task, especially for internationally listed directory entries where the directory owner may be less than responsive for administrative tasks like changing a contact email)
• Email addresses at your ISP do not help you build your online brand – they’re not distinguishable or as memorable as an email address on your domain
• You generally only get a small number of email addresses with your ISP. On your domain name you can have a separate email for each function of your business or each person who works with you.

Getting emails set up

If you have a hosted ecommerce solution like Ozcart™, you may have a email tool to set up new email addresses or a support team that will do them for you. Our support team will set up an unlimited number of email addresses for customers that you can then use in your email program like Outlook or Windows Mail as well as in your store.

Some customers prefer to use external email programs to manage their email separately from their domain name. We can set up our mail server to ignore incoming mail and simply let it go to your mail provider instead.

Either way, you can get email addresses set up for your business to reflect the things you want to do in your store.

A popular list of email addresses are things like:

• sales@yourdomain.com.au – general store email, used on your contact us page, used for follow up emails/reviews/store contact.
• orders @yourdomain.com.au – used by the cart for sending out order confirmation emails, tracking numbers, order status changes, etc.
• media@yourdomain.com.au – if you will be doing a lot of press work (news releases, etc.) or interacting with third parties this might be helpful to you.
• returns@yourdomain.com.au – used for customers requesting returns/exchanges.
• @yourdomain.com.au – for personal emails on your domain. If you want to be easy to email, you might want to make this quite memorable. If you want customers and third parties to use the official email channels you might not make this very easy to guess.

You can have an unlimited number of emails on your domain so don’t be limited by this list. The email addresses that you get set up should match the way you do business. Set up as many or as few as you need.

Sending and receiving emails

You’ll need to set up your email accounts in popular email programs like Outlook. This is a case of going to the Accounts screen of the email application you are using and then following the email setup wizard.

One little trap to avoid is that even if you are not using their email accounts, ISPs usually reserve a particular channel between your computer and their system for sending outgoing email. This is known as the email port. By default email is usually sent on port number 25 so if your ISP is using this port for their own outgoing email then your email program will need to use a different number for outgoing email. Our servers use port number 26 for outgoing email but it’s not set by default in email programs so when you get your email address, you just have to go into your advanced email settings in Outlook and change the setting from 25 to 26 and you’re away. Our support team can give information on this if you’re a customer of ours and having trouble doing it. It’s easier than it sounds.

Setting them up in your store

Once you have your email addresses set up in your email program, you need to assign tasks in your store to them – so that the shopping cart knows to use them. This is easy to do. In Ozcart™ for example, you go to the Setup menu, then Getting Started then email settings and can assign email addresses to all of the following tasks:

• Getting copies of certain system emails
• Setting your main contact us email address (the “from” address for emails sent by the system to customers and the “to” address for emails sent from your contact form to you). This email is also used for “Ask a question” product enquiries.
• Order confirmation email address
• Tell a friend email address (if you’re using this feature)
• Gift Voucher/Discount coupon emails
• Order status emails
• Reviews emails
• Low stock emails to you

After sale follow ups

Another way to use email is to send automatic follow up emails to customers after a certain period after they buy. The after sales email system in Ozcart™ lets you do this so you can automatically send an email to customers a set period after they buy asking them for their opinion of the product, or encouraging them to either write a review or post a review on Facebook.

You can also send emails to customers who have signed up but never bought from you, or ones who have bought from you but not for a long time.

And of course, there are newsletters that you can send to people who have subscribed to your system. Ozcart™ has a built in email newsletter system, but if you want to use one of the popular third party newsletter management systems like MailChimp, you can export subscribing email addresses to a spreadsheet to import into that tool as well.

There are a lot of ways you can use email in your store, and it can be a powerful tool beyond just a way to get copies of your orders.