E-Mail Communication to Retain E-Commerce Customers

By DoItYourself.com Staff

Communications is one of the easiest forms of stickiness to implement in many e-commerce sites and Internet stores. Customers will frequently sign up for e-mail on your web site, but you still need to address a few questions before you can begin incorporating customer communications into your site.

Where will customers sign up?
From anywhere on your site, from the checkout process, or from some other place? Will you be buying or renting e-mail addresses from other companies? How will you track where your e-mail addresses came from? If you're collecting names from different places, you should know where they came from so that you can monitor the response.

How will you track the results of your e-mails?
Whether you're issuing a discount code or tracking the number of people who click on links in the e-mail, you need to have some way of judging the response and success of the e-mail. Ultimately, the success is measured in increased sales, but you need a way to associate increased sales with specific e-mails to help you decide what works and what doesn't work in future e-mails.

How will customers remove themselves from the lists?
Any "opt-out" process should be easy for customers to find and complete. Ideally, customers should be able to send an "unsubscribe" e-mail to a particular address, or click a link in the e-mail to be automatically removed from the list.

Who will be pulling the lists together when it's time to send e-mails?
You probably don't want to send e-mail to your entire list every time, so you'll need a tool that can be used to specify which e-mail addresses are desired recipients for a particular e-mail. Ideally, this tool should be designed so that the group responsible for writing the e-mail, often the marketing department, can also pull up the list, thus reducing overhead on the technology department. The complexity of the queries will determine the complexity of the tool. For example, do you anticipate sending e-mails to buyers? Or will you be sending e-mails to buyers who have purchased specific merchandise during a specific time frame?

How will the e-mails be sent?
If you are planning to send 10,000 e-mails over your company's T1 line from your Exchange Server through your ISP's mail relay server, think again. Most ISPs have strong restrictions on sending bulk e-mail through their systems and Exchange Server requires specialized knowledge and architecture to be able to directly deliver thousands of e-mails. Many companies use third party e-mail services like MessageReach to deliver their bulk e-mail, so make sure you have taken into account the cost of such services, which can be as high as $0.05 per e-mail.

How many types of e-mail will you offer?
If your marketing department tells you that they are only going to offer a single e-mail "newsletter," then they're not thinking far enough ahead. Any design that you create should allow users to sign up for one or many different newsletters, allow lists to be pulled reflecting the newsletters that users have signed up for, and allow users to remove themselves from all or a certain number of the lists.

Will your e-mail be sent out as straight text or HTML?
Who will write the e-mail, and what will the approval process be? Can you purchase or build a tool to make the e-mail creation something that a non-technical employee can take care of, or will your HTML programmers also be responsible for designing outgoing HTML marketing newsletters? If a custom tool is required, how complex will it have to be, and how long will it take to write?

Who will be responsible for handling "bounced" e-mail?
Can you find a way to automate this? A clever Exchange Server script programmer can write scripts to handle incoming "undeliverable" messages and automatically remove those e-mail addresses from future lists. This is especially important if you are paying per e-mail address for your e-mails to be sent.

Will you rent or sell your e-mail lists to other companies?
If so, make sure that you clearly indicate this possibility to customers when they provide their e-mail address to you. If you acquire e-mail addresses through several methods, ensure that every method provides this warning, or keep track of the e-mail addresses that can be sold and rented, and those that can't, because the customers have been notified of the possibility. If you will sell or rent e-mail lists, how will you generate those lists? What format will they be provided in? What tools will be used to generate those lists?

How will you keep track of when an e-mail address was acquired?

E-mail addresses can be become "stale," and if you are paying per address to send e-mails, you want to be able to track which ones are generating responses, especially sales, and delete e-mail addresses that have not generated a response in a given period of time. In order to do this, you need to know when you acquired the address and when an e-mail last generated a response from that address.

In this age of spam, or "junk" e-mail, blocked senders lists, and general e-mail abuse, your company should take care to follow some rules of etiquette with your e-mail communications. Some of these rules require technical support, so be prepared to incorporate the necessary support into your overall site design.

Never send an e-mail to someone who has not asked to receive it. If you're renting or buying addresses from another company, make sure that the people on that list were notified that their e-mail addresses were subject to sale or rental at the time they provided the addresses to that other company. Do not send e-mails to any of your customers who haven't been offered the chance to "opt out" of receiving e-mail from you.
Ensure that all e-mails contain instructions that the recipients can follow to remove themselves from the list. Test these instructions to make sure they're flawless.
Make sure that you keep a list of people who have asked to be removed from your lists, and make sure you run that "negative" list against any future mailings, so you don't accidentally send them e-mail again.
Keep your e-mails reasonably infrequent. Targeted e-mails that are sent infrequently to a small audience will have more effect than daily e-mails sent to your entire mailing list.

The quickest way to lose the goodwill and future sales of customers is to send them unsolicited e-mail. Don't do it. E-mail communications can be a powerful tool for generating stickiness. The key to a successful implementation of e-mail communications is to design the functionality as part of the site rather than trying to tack it on afterwards.

Web masters and Retailer Web site owners can implement the above time tested and sure hit methods and can reap the benefits. Even small nuances in this article, if tactfully incorporated in your site, will lead you to retain the current customer list and future return customers.