Using Emails to Build a Relationship with Your Ecommerce Customers

A Home Business Article Contributed by Marsha Maung

Using Emails to Build a Relationship with Your Ecommerce Customers

When ecommerce first struck the world of conventional Internet users, it was revolutionary, the idea was refreshing...but the thought of using it frightening. The uncertainty of buying something from an ecommerce store using a credit card was not only scary but extremely frightening. What with the number of fraud cases rising.

Using Emails to Promote Your Ecommerce Store

This sounds suspiciously like SPAM but it is not. Let's do a quick stat check. In August 2001, Verizon Communications announced that 160 billion messages annually in the US. That sounds astronomous by any accounts, but consider this fact if you want to take your ecommerce store seriously. Not a year has passed and the email toll has risen to 10 billion - A DAY worldwide! Most of them are from small to medium ecommerce stores.

Email Marketing Has Been Suffering

As useful and convenient as it is for ecommerce business owners to use emails to promote their products or services, it is also now QUITE illegal. Recently, there has been laws passed to prevent people from sending out emails to groups of people they don't know. Even Yahoo and Hotmail users may or may not get all their emails because of all the filtering that's been done.

Bad News for Ecommerce Business Owners

That's totally bad news for the ecommerce business owners. Newsletters and mailing lists used to sit right at the top of the list for being one of the most effective online marketing tools anyone can ever imagine. It's cheap and effective as well. But now ecommerce business owners find that their HTML emails are often found by the recipients in the trash or in the bulk mail folder. Some have even been thrown right out of the mailbox by the filtering softwares.

Even hosting companies have beefed up on their hosting tools by implementing spam-filtering softwares that takes promotional emails into the spam box.

What Now?

It's not the end of the world for the ecommerce business. Although the chances of our emails promoting our ecommerce business reaching the correct audience is now at an all-time low, we're not defeated.

The horrible thing about all this is that being genuine and sincere online ecommerce store owners, we wish there was something we could do to help our ecommerce customers differentiate us from the other spammers.

Ecommerce Email Solution

It is now best not to use HTML emails. Yes, they are more cosmetically attractively but the email may not even reach the recipient. So, go back to the old way of sending out text emails.

Remove all spam-filter warning words, like free, FREE, work at home, and words like that. The filters will send the email to a different folder if any one of the words are found in the email. Give your customers options. Options to opt in, opt out, frequency, and type of email (yes, we still give them the option to receive HTML emails from the ecommerce site if they want).

Use autoresponders to send your ecommerce customers a highly targeted email. One by one, a shot at a time instead of sending an army of emails to them, turning them off immediately.

While you're trying to beat the anti-spam filters, let's not forget about the focus of your email: your ecommerce business and your customers' needs. Each and every email needs to be focused on the customers' needs, personalized to the tee and also should beat all anti-spam filters.

Writing promotional emails for an ecommerce store has never been this tough, but once you get the hang of it, you'll be able to churn out promotional emails in 5 minutes flat.