Email Equals Client: Tips For Magento Store Owners

As customer-to-customer

I bet you’ve shopped online before and a hundred to one – more than once and more than at one single store. Now, imagine you have to answer a question: what’s the most disappointing and frustrating thing you’ve encountered with while buying online? I’ll try to guess: disinformation, delivery/shipping difficulties, payment problems or maybe even rudeness. But there’s one the most frustrating experience equally for customers and owners – email delivery.
Why would I put it above all the others, sometimes even more unforgiving troubles? Setting up proper SMTP email delivery for a Magento store is a simple task, but a client who didn’t get his confirmation email will never ever come back and probably will turn to your competitor, who may not have the cheapest price, but welcomes every customer with a warmhearted letter.

‘Dear John’

E-commerce relies on a silent communication via emails, that’s how it works and you can’t do anything about it. It’s either ‘take me or leave me’ kind of thing, and ‘me’ means business, in that case. I titled this paragraph ‘Dear John’ not because of handsome Channing Tatum. You must inform a customer regarding his order either way, no matter what news you have to tell – is it an ‘Everything is great’ email or ‘Houston, we have a problem’ one. Getting feedback is always comforting and assuring, it’s polite, after all.
I also want to draw attention to marketing emails. It’s a powerful tool to increase your sales and stay in touch with your customers making them coming back again and again. Imagine it’s holiday season and you’ve been preparing a fabulous marketing email campaign with all that fancy design and catchy slogans with -50% sales. You might have even hired a talented marketer for that purpose. But due to wrong settings of Magento email SMTP more than a half of your target audience hasn’t received your letters. Big miss, don’t you think? As a result, your time, efforts, and money have been waisted.

Back To Basics

Confirmation emails should be delivered within a couple of minutes max right after a customer makes an order. For those, who sends emails manually – it’s a shame on you people, living in the 21st century and not using the perks of progress is simply silly. What about weekends and days off when you’re offline? Customers shop 24/7, and even on Sunday they must be able to make an order and be sure that you’ll take care of it on Monday. Moreover, there is a bunch of unfortunate technical issues, like losing internet connection while clicking ‘Ok’ button, or web bugging or unresponsive server. Take everything into account and get it covered.
Set up your Magento SMTP server in sake of increasing your delivery and conversion rate as well – it’d be better to get some help from a qualified specialist or install a ready to go extension. Don’t overestimate your programming skills – you may skip the fact that email providers sometimes change their settings, ports, etc and setting things up can be a little bit trickier than you first thought.
Be thoughtful and pay attention to your clients – a small letter with 200 words can bring you a lot more than just a client, it’ll get you YOUR client.