I have been running an online store selling two type of products, in 5 different sizes, for 12 months now.
It has been my first experiment with running my own online store, and I have learnt alot, and made many mistakes.
Auto Responders can save you a TON of time.
My site, although popular, is a pretty niche kids product, and my traffic is in the hundreds per day, not thousands. With this kind of traffic, I’ll easily get 5 -10 emails per day with questions about the product (If I was to be honest, all about information already found on the site)
- Inbox full of the SAME email questions?
It was taking me 30 minutes to reply to all these emails each day, and although I am not completely stupid and had templates setup, I still had to take the time to evaluate emails and send the appropriate response.
After enabling ‘Canned Responses’ in my gmail account, I realised I could automate the response to certain questions I was asked frequently, which would save me time, and create a faster response time for my customers.
By using the subject line that my website sent me from forms on the website, I was able to create a ‘filter’ or ‘rule’, to answer automatically.
Below is a summary of the email auto-response I used:
Hi There
My name is James Richardson from Online-Store.com.au
Thanks for getting in touch, please read the ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ at the bottom of the page to see if we have already answered your question. if not, we’ll get right back at you shortly.
In the mean time, if you would like to go ahead and order your Trampoline from our website, we’d like to give you a special offer.
$10 off the total order price
Just enter the code ‘vip’ at checkout for the discount!
Thanks for visiting our website
James
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Website
Email
Phone
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: How much is shipping?
A: This varies depending on your location. The quickest and easiest way is to put your postcode into the Postage calculator on any of our pages.
Q: Can i come see the product?
A: No, unfortunately at this stage, to keep costs and prices low, we do not have a showroom
Q: How long does delivery take?
A: Anywhere from 3 days, to a week, depending on location
Q. Do your products have a warranty?
A: Yes! Check out our warranty page
The above is just an example of what you could do, I am still testing out what works for me, but it seems to be working. How do you tell if it’s working? I get people responding to my auto responder-that makes me happy, and also chuckle to myself just a little.
Try it today, and see how much time you could be saving each day.
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