Page 1 of 1

Customers Not Seeing Our Emails

PostPosted: Fri Feb 20, 2004 9:28 am
by Larry Bohen
With the significant amount of SPAM that folks receive many solutions are
available for individuals to filter it out and not have to deal with it.

I am finding that in some cases our legitimate emails (status of their
order; your order is being shipped; perhaps ShopSite's automatic order
confirmation) are never seen by the customer because it goes into a "bulk" /
SPAM folder which the customer may not check or if they do, may overlook our
email.

Is anyone seeing/suspecting the above?

Solutions?

--
Larry Bohen
www.audiobooksonline.com

Re: Customers Not Seeing Our Emails

PostPosted: Fri Feb 20, 2004 10:17 am
by Jim
If you can figure out a way to get past spam filters so that a shopper
will always get your emails, I'm sure that spammers would like to know
about it and you could make big bucks. ;-)

Jim

Larry Bohen wrote:

With the significant amount of SPAM that folks receive many solutions are
available for individuals to filter it out and not have to deal with it.

I am finding that in some cases our legitimate emails (status of their
order; your order is being shipped; perhaps ShopSite's automatic order
confirmation) are never seen by the customer because it goes into a "bulk" /
SPAM folder which the customer may not check or if they do, may overlook our
email.

Is anyone seeing/suspecting the above?

Solutions?

Re: Customers Not Seeing Our Emails

PostPosted: Fri Feb 20, 2004 10:49 am
by Larry Bohen
Jim; Sounds like a great opportunity IF I were interested in helping
SPAMMERS.

I'm searching for ways that legitimate online businesses can continue to
communicate with customer and inquirers with the proliferation of SPAM
filtering solutions.

One thing we will implement is a message in the online ordering process,
alerting customers to our email practices to motivate them to be on the
watch for our emails, perhaps in their "bulk" folders and to ask them to add
us to their whitelist if they use one.

Any other ideas out there?

--
Larry Bohen
www.audiobooksonline.com
"Jim" <jstavast@xmission.com> wrote in message
news:c15bsb$dto$1@support.shopsite.com...
If you can figure out a way to get past spam filters so that a shopper
will always get your emails, I'm sure that spammers would like to know
about it and you could make big bucks. ;-)

Jim

Larry Bohen wrote:

With the significant amount of SPAM that folks receive many solutions
are
available for individuals to filter it out and not have to deal with it.

I am finding that in some cases our legitimate emails (status of their
order; your order is being shipped; perhaps ShopSite's automatic order
confirmation) are never seen by the customer because it goes into a
"bulk" /
SPAM folder which the customer may not check or if they do, may overlook
our
email.

Is anyone seeing/suspecting the above?

Solutions?

Re: Customers Not Seeing Our Emails

PostPosted: Fri Feb 20, 2004 2:30 pm
by David
Larry,

Just punt. The spammers have trashed email as a reliable communication
medium.

I assume that you are receiving email from your customers asking questions
that would have already been answered had they received/read the email
that Shopsite sent. Grit your teeth, respond courteously and write it off
as 'customer service.'

We use UPS Worldship software that generates an email from UPS to the
recipient with the tracking information. We send the package tracking
information to the customer and the shipment information to ourselves.
That way, when the customer sends us an email asking for the tracking
information (that UPS already sent the them) we just forward the UPS email
that we have in our file to the customer. (And, yes, I grit my teeth every
time.)

Dave

On Fri, 20 Feb 2004 11:49:15 -0500, Larry Bohen
<lbohen@audiobooksonline.com> wrote:

Jim; Sounds like a great opportunity IF I were interested in helping
SPAMMERS.

I'm searching for ways that legitimate online businesses can continue to
communicate with customer and inquirers with the proliferation of SPAM
filtering solutions.

One thing we will implement is a message in the online ordering process,
alerting customers to our email practices to motivate them to be on the
watch for our emails, perhaps in their "bulk" folders and to ask them to
add
us to their whitelist if they use one.

Any other ideas out there?




--
Using M2, Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/m2/

Re: Customers Not Seeing Our Emails

PostPosted: Sat Feb 21, 2004 3:06 pm
by Nikolaus Gruchot
Hi Larry,

here is what I recommend:

1. use plain text in your emails, never HTML

2. use a easy to recognize email sender information, such as:

Shipping - audiobooksonline.com <shipping@audiobooksonline.com>

NOT Shipping <shipping@audiobooksonline.com>

or

Larry Bohen - audiobooksonline.com <bohen@audiobooksonline.com >

NOT Larry Bohen <bohen@audiobooksonline.com >

and make sure that your email address is not ending in a number such as
shipping2@....


and your email will make through most of the spam filters.

What you will never be able to improve is the fact that most users simply DO
NOT read the emails that they are receiving. Every second call we receive,
people are sitting in front of their computer and do discover "Ah yeah now I
see it..." our emails while talking to us ;-)

Best regards from Germany,

Niko


"Larry Bohen" <lbohen@audiobooksonline.com> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:c15dqb$e9f$1@support.shopsite.com...
Jim; Sounds like a great opportunity IF I were interested in helping
SPAMMERS.


[...]

Any other ideas out there?

--
Larry Bohen
www.audiobooksonline.com