An Alternative To Email?

Spam is now affecting my ecommerce business...

[warrisr]

I operate half a dozen very successful specialty ecommerce based businesses. I don’t use email to promote my sites or products and have no interest in doing so. But I do rely on email in communicating with my customers after they have ordered from my sites. The recent deluge in spam however is now starting to negatively impact this communication channel.

For example, some ISP’s are now starting to block email messages from my hosting service for “too many undeliverable email messages”, which my hosting service says is being caused by spammers sending hundreds of thousands of email messages with forged headers to their customers. My hosting service has been trying to work with the ISP’s to resolve the problem, but it seems that they are having some difficulty dealing with the ISPs.

In addition, more and more people are installing anti-spam software that takes a very heavy-handed approach to controlling spam, blocking email messages from anyone not in the user’s contact list.

Then of course is the shear volume of junk email that people are getting now, making it easy to overlook email from legitimate senders.

I now feel that I really must start to look at alternative ways of communicating with my customers. I am already working on changing our back end processes to support a web based tracking system that the customer can use to get the status of their order, update their order information, reprint receipts, packing slips etc., and communicate with us via a web based interface where they can post a message and we can post a reply that they can then read using their browser.

Are there any other alternative communication channels that others are using? (Other than phone.) Is IM mature enough to start using? (To at least let the customer know that information about their order, or a reply to their question has been posted on the order tracking page.)

Ron

[photon]

It would take some education for your customers, but you could try RSS feeds to substitute for a blanket email.

[Essex_boy]

I have a supplier who uses the mail, he prints his envelopes with his logo on the front, so it doesnt get binned.

Each campaign type has a new header I/ Promooffers, Billing etc etc etc

So you know what his are about, I do search my mail for these so it works

[warrisr]

Photon: I have experimented with RSS myself and have concluded it is really not ready for primetime just yet. Plus I would prefer not to require my customers to install software just to communicate with me.

Essex_boy: I am actually considering using mail to follow up on orders, but I don't think it would work very well for an order that is in progress.

It seems that the majority of people do use IM, but I am a bit concerned about the reliablity of the channel in that if the user is off line the odds of a message getting through are significantly reduced.

Ron

[chadmg]

I'm not sure IM is a correct solution. There are too many different clients and both parties need to be online at the same time. It's also rather obtrusive. I would NEVER give my IM to any company.

However, it looks like you are already headed in the right direction here...

I am already working on changing our back end processes to support a web based tracking system that the customer can use to get the status of their order, update their order information, reprint receipts, packing slips etc., and communicate with us via a web based interface where they can post a message and we can post a reply that they can then read using their browser.

Really you can't do that much more. If it's really important in your business to contact the customer during a transaction and the email bounces, you can track the bounces and then give the customer a call. If it's not obtrusive, they may be glad that you did. Sometimes ISP's will just delete the spam (I think). Then what else really can you do? You can make sure you have a help page that answers the question "how come i didn't receive an email confirmation?" or something similar.