Manage your relationship with your customers with Mustang List
You know you can use Mustang List to send your email newsletter and other promotional emails, but have you considered the system’s transactional applications? You probably already send a confirmation email that is auto-generated from your website when a customer makes a purchase. But what if you want to contact that customer later to find out how their shopping experience was? What if you want to send them a small series of questions or a survey so you can find out how you’re doing? Mustang List’s Response Form and Recurring Message features can combine to create a powerful customer communication management tool. Find out how you’re doing by sending an email that includes a link to a short survey a few days after your online sale. This is not a confirmation email, this is an email that you can send a few days after the sale to stay in front of the customer and solicit feedback. Here’s how:
- When a purchase is made on your website, use the API to have the purchaser added to a list in Mustang List. You’ll probably want to create a list like “web purchasers” for this purpose. You cannot add these customers’ email addresses to your regular newsletter list unless you explicitly asked for and received permission. Be sure to carefully manage this new list to avoid mailing them marketing emails.
- Set up a survey of the questions you’d like to ask the customer using Mustang List’s Response Forms.
- Set up a Recurring Message to send a fixed number of days after the Sign Up date (the Sign Up date being the date they were added to the list by the API, the date of purchase). You should already be sending a confirmation email immediately upon purchasing, so give the customer a few days’ break before you send this email. Depending on the types of questions you ask, you might want to anticipate the number of days it would normally take for the item to ship and send the survey after the customer would most likely have received the item.
- After the purchaser is added to the list, the clock will start ticking on your recurring message and X number of days after the date they were added to the list, the email with the link to the survey will be sent.
- After you receive your first response, you can view the responses online in Mustang List or export the responses to a CSV file for viewing in MS excel and other applications. You can also view the bounce, open, and click rate data in Mustang List (something you can’t do with web-generated emails).
Keep in mind:
- You can absolutely send an email to a customer that’s transactional in nature, but DON’T market to them as they might consider the communication unsolicited commercial email (aka SPAM).
- DO carefully manage your list of web purchasers list and purge it occasionally to avoid accidentally sending marketing emails to these customers.
- DO include a shout out and link to sign up for your newsletter. Sending a “How are we doing” email and survey is a great way to build your email list if you properly solicit and receive permission.