Email Marketing Goes Hand-in-Glove With E-Commerce Shipping
ShippingEasy on Thursday launched Automated Email Marketing as an addition to its customer management module.
This new tool has a powerful rules engine that helps users increase sales, the company said. It can carry out the following actions:
- Set up a trigger to send an email to first-time buyers immediately after an order is downloaded — customized with a logo and specific coupon code if desired;
- Automatically send an email requesting customer feedback on the order and shipping process, defined by order size and set for sending after a specific interval to ensure delivery has been made;
- Define targeted customers for loyalty rewards or coupon promos by various criteria, including how often and how much they purchase, or when and how long ago they made a purchase.
Automated Email Marketing also can be set up to help generate product reviews, upsell related products, and win back customers.
A library of plug-and-play templates come with it, including for coupons, product review requests, feedback requests, first-time buyers and VIP buyers.
Back-End Support
ShippingEasy’s cloud-based e-commerce shipping platform offers the cheapest United States Postal Service postage rates, according to the company.
It’s compatible with existing UPS and FedEx accounts, and works with Endicia.
Users can integrate it with shipping APIs from 3dcart, Amazon Prime Shipping, Amazon Seller Central, Bigcommerce, ChannelAdvisor, eBay, Etsy, Magento, QuickBooks, Shopify and more.
“ShippingEasy is mostly about inventory management in the delivery chain,” said Michael Jude, research manager at Stratecast/Frost & Sullivan.
“They already manage the shipping process, so adding email-based marketing would be a real time-saver for their clients,” he told CRM Buyer.
“ShippingEasy has unique data that no other vendors have without deep integrations,” said Rob Zaleski, the company’s digital content marketer.
“We have all connected store and marketplace details, product details, order details and shipping-related details,” he told CRM Buyer.
The Automated Email Marketing tool connects with user companies’ order and shipping data, allowing automatic triggering of emails while users carry out their normal operations, Zaleski said.
ShippingEasy customers can add their own customer or user lists to the company’s systems at any time.
Purpose-Built for E-Commerce
ShippingEasy’s automated email funtionality was “designed and built exclusively for e-commerce companies,” Zaleski said. Because ShippingEasy is cloud-based and uses the Software as a Service model, “no installed hardware or databases are needed.”
The company’s customer management module, including the new automated email marketing tool, is priced at US$ 9 to $ 49 per month, depending on the number of orders a customer processes.
“Unlike many competitors, customers can have an unlimited number of subscribers and lists,” Zaleski pointed out.
Target Market
The automated email marketing tool is geared toward small business e-commerce firms. It’s mainly used to target consumers, but it could be used in a B2B environment, Zaleski said.
That said, automated email marketing “seems to have much more resonance in the B2C space,” noted Frost’s Jude. “It’s largely supplanted the traditional fliers people used to receive in the mail.”
Automated email marketing wouldn’t work as well in the B2B environment, he suggested, because “it’s very hard to target the right people, and purchases are mostly a pull kind of thing, not push.”
ShippingEasy’s automated email marketing tool is “a convenient time-saver that also boosts customer service for small businesses or the network of individual sellers,” said Cindy Zhou, principal analyst at Constellation Research.
“These small businesses are resource-challenged,” she told CRM Buyer, “when it does to designing and executing emails to customers for offers or related products, or informing them of shipping status.”
Richard Adhikari has been an ECT News Network reporter since 2008. His areas of focus include cybersecurity, mobile technologies, CRM, databases, software development, mainframe and mid-range computing, and application development. He has written and edited for numerous publications, including Information Week and Computerworld. He is the author of two books on client/server technology.
Email Richard.