Goodness that is a boring title. Please don’t run away and hide, this is actually going to be pretty useful to any store owner who has managed to jump the many and varied hurdles involved in actually starting an eCommerce business, and acquired a steady stream of orders in the process. Because, after that first taste of eCommerce success, moving onto the next level is all about email automation.

Customer service emailing is a potential minefield of lost time

Before you wonder if we have lost our minds, no, we are not saying that customer service emailing is bad for your business, rather that inefficient emailing and a reliance on manual systems is. As a rule of thumb, for every 10 orders that your store receives, you will need to apportion around 45 minutes to administration, of which the majority will be emailing. This might seem like a lot of time, but between customer queries, address inputting mistakes, returns & exchange processing and potentially even product failures, the average time that you will spend administering the life cycle of one order can equate to a surprising amount of time. The obvious response is of course to make your processes more efficient in order to meet customer email workload and to save time as your business grows, and to this end, you should definitely…

Go ticket based

If you currently rely on your email inbox to both receive and reply to customer emails, then a move to a ticket based system such as the popular Zen Desk environment should be your first consideration in order to save time and improve customer service levels. Using a ticket based system is a revelation. No more forgetting which emails have been replied to, no more forgetting at what stage you are at in the conversation, and finally, a tangible resolution to the conversation when you mark the ticket as ‘solved’ – which is a very satisfying feeling. In addition, you can set up auto responder emails from the service, improve email delivery rates and hence have less chance of your emails becoming junked, and even have comments on both your business Facebook and Twitter accounts turned into tickets automatically – the list is endless.

Potential time saving: 20 minutes per every hour compared to using a non-ticket based system Cost saving: Technically none as Zen Desk is a paid solution, but if you look at the potential benefits of better and more timely customer service emailing, you could see more repeat business through enhanced customer satisfaction.*

Non customer service emails – email marketing

The other side of the eCommerce email coin is of course email marketing. Clearly different to the administrative based customer service email situations we have just been talking about, email marketing is essentially the promotion of your store to both new and established customers via the medium of email. Ok, for regular MailBeez readers and users, that one is a bit obvious, but we’re just trying to clearly differentiate the different worlds that email marketing and customer service emailing inhabit.

Automating email marketing

If you only take one thing away from this it should be that where marketing is concerned, email has the highest ROI (return on investment) of any medium. Forget adverts, Google paid results, even the increasingly popular Facebook ads and sponsored stories, email is still the best medium with which to target your customers. Bearing this in mind, automating your email marketing campaigns is simply essential. If we take even a small eCommerce store with say 500 customers, just imagine having to email each one individually, with for example, personalized offers based on their purchase (or non-purchase) history. We’re talking hours of administration, all of which is simply not feasible, or even necessary, not when there are spiffing automation tools right at your fingertips. Yes, we mean us!

MailBeez is automated eCommerce email marketing

When it’s not automating product review requests, winning back older customers, motivating existing customers to share your store with their friends, or even inquiring why a cart was abandoned, it’s sitting in your store admin giving you widget based feedback on how your campaigns are doing. Yes, MailBeez is a very clever app, one who’s very installation on your site will save you hundreds of man hours, all whilst cleverly mining and developing each and every customer’s life cycle at your store with the sole aim of getting you more revenue and greater sales.

• Potential time saving: literally hundreds of hours
  Cost saving: €70,000 per year – (the combined salary of 3 members of staff working full time trying to manually replicate MailBeez)*