E-mail Marketing
You will want a customer to receive three e-mails after the Shopping Cart stage:
- Confirmation that the order has been placed
- Confirmation that the payment has been accepted from the credit or debit card
- Confirmation that the goods have been dispatched
You may wish to allow the customer to track their order.
E-mail Marketing is a separate issue, but very important. At some stage you should ask a potential customer or customer to sign up for more information about you and your products. Note that it is illegal to sent unsolicited emails to people. So, you should have an area on the site where people opt-in to receive information.
Potential Customers
Potential customers may visit your site, but it is unlikely that they will purchase on the first visit. There is a whole world of sites to be explored before making a decision. Encourage potential customers to sign up for more information, just by giving their email address. Now send them a series of emails at equal intervals, maybe an email every three or four days. It will remind them who you are and, more importantly, it will continue to put your Web address in front of them. Most people won't have Bookmarked your address, so the chances are that if you don't remind them they may never return to you. Research shows that it takes six to nine e- mails to turn a potential customer into an actual customer. Plan a campaign of twelve to fifteen emails, if the potential customer hasn't purchased anything after that number, give up. You will only annoy them if you continue. It is important that you give them the opportunity to unsubscribe from the campaign. You don't want to be known as a 'spammer'.
This is done fully automatically for you, but of course you have to provide the content of the e-mails.
Customers
Once a potential customer has been converted to a customer the e-mail campaign is switched off. Now all customers who have signed up will receive a monthly e-mail newsletter.
The newsletter is particularly important and must be written in two formats and sent out as what is called a 'multi-part' e-mail. Part of the e-mail is an HTML e-mail that can contain rich features like graphics. The other part is 'text-only' and displays when a customer has HTML emails switched off on their e-mail client, which many people do, or they receive the e- mail on a mobile phone or Blackberry-type device.
These e-mails are a very specialised part of Web design, because Outlook, Outlook Express, Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, Blackberry, Mobile Devices and other e-mail clients all display the e- mails differently. The cost of these emails must be built into your annual budget.
Using RomanCart, for example, there is an in-built allowance of 40,000 marketing e-mails per month.
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