Engage Users with Emails & Notifications

Email and Notifications Overview

This article is going to be about the email and notification system within the marketplace eCommerce platform. One of the things about emailing within a marketplace eCommerce system, is that it's absolutely vital to the success or failure of many of the transactions and the usefulness of the application itself to be able to engage users.

With a well implemented system, you are able to re-engage those users so that they can join the site and get back into a process that they may have already been engaged in, or pick up a process based on a recommendation that is similar to what other users are doing within the marketplace. In addition to that, the email system itself is a great way to get buyers and sellers to interact in a managed way so that standard email communication and options can even generate automated transactional emails.

Important Key Considerations

In order to enable the email system to be very capable, it's important to have several key things in place within the system itself. In particular, it's very critical to enable a queue-based system for the emails so that the application if or when it does become overloaded and receives a spike in traffic it's not going to cause the server to slow down. Because the emails themselves are going to get queued and persisted, and if for whatever reason there's an outage on the email sending capability, the email messages are not going to get lost. So, that's a pretty typical base best practice to queue up the emails that get sent out.

In addition to that, setting up white listing of the domain and the underlying resources around the email sending so that the emails themselves don't tend to go into junk mail. As well as being trusted for different various email services that are available and making sure that effectively the domain for your marketplace is white listed as best possible and stays out of blacklists for email recipients.

Now, it's critical that you collaborate to confirm around some of the base level best practices for email templates and formats so that folks can unsubscribe. Do they have the ability to see terms and privacy? Are formatting best practices implemented so that this information is displayed clearly? We highly recommend that you have the ability with any marketplace software to completely customize any aspect of the email themselves. Not just the overall template, but any headers and attachments etc that are associated with the emails.

It's also important to think about when emails go out and how those emails can be triggered based on different various workflows. You know, one of the biggest things about email is technically or relatively speaking it’s very cheap, if not affectively free to send out an email. So, emails can be very powerful from a customer support perspective to keep customers informed proactively as their products and orders go through the different stages of fulfillment. It can also be extremely effective from a marketing and follow-up perspective to engage buyers and sellers with the marketplace and continue to keep them in the loop and even engage them within the marketplace platform.

Consumer Benefits & Rewards

Not only is it helpful from that regard, but it can also be something that's very rewarding for the user. If there's valuable content that can go out along promotions or recommendations, possibly those are resources that folks are finding helpful or particular areas of the site that are getting a significant amount of traffic, therefore are highly recommended based on different user profiles. Someone might find it very helpful to get information about how to complete an installation of a certain type of product or how to guide that might be available within the marketplace itself. That kind of information can go along really nicely with actual products that are in the marketplace that are for sale.

In addition, it's also really helpful to the overall user experience on the site and what they are particularly focused on to drive all of the content that's going out in an email. So, in other words, if somebody is really focused on radios and stereos, then you may want to show them content that's relevant to radios and stereos. Whether those are discounts, clearance items, accessories, services, or even related digital products with different subscriptions to radio channels. That might be like paid radio channels, or possibly digital music that they can download and have on their stereo system. Beyond that, giving people access to some of the newer or more popular products can also help engage them in different various topics.

So, email marketing and contacting folks about their potential interests on the site can be very powerful. Especially powerful to help move someone along if they have items in their wish list, shopping list, or items in their cart that maybe the price information has gone down or availability is running low and you want to notify them about the stock quantity. By informing them there's a sale going on, you bring added value that's built into the marketplace that wouldn't be there hadn't you have notified the end user and give them a transactional heads up about their relevant information.