More email tricks
| More email tricks | |
28 November 2003
Here are a couple more to try out and progress towards email guru-ship. Returning to the example we used last time, that of exampleco’s handling of brochure requests received by email; let’s move the scenario on a bit more. (If you missed the first episode of this email saga, you can view it here) We are now at the stage that the email has landed in our in-box with the Subject line “Web brochure request”. Because we’ve added text to the body of the email, all the potential customer has had to do is key in his or her postal address and click Send. Now it’s all good and well sending out these brochures on demand. We need some way of keeping track and initiating follow up. We could do this by inserting into the coding an instruction that the email is automatically copied to our sales people. To do this, the email link grows even bigger. At the moment, it reads, To automatically copy the email to sales we need to add in &cc=sales@exampleco.co.uk The link is now as follows, Firstly, most web hosting packages include free autoresponders. These are easy to configure from your web host’s online control panel. It is merely a matter of selecting the email address you wish to append the auto message to and then typing in the message. The automatic message is sent out when the email lands at your domain. The alternative method sends out an autoresponder when you actually download your email into Outlook or other email client software. To set this up, create your automatic message in Notepad and save it. The text can be along the lines of, “Thank you for your email. We will process your request as soon as possible.” This is fairly generic, low maintenance and covers a host of possibilities. As we have already specified the Subject line for brochure requests, check the option ‘Where the Subject line contains specific words’. In the third box down, click on the blue text ‘contains specific words’ and type in Web brochure request. Click Add then OK. In the second text box, scroll down and check Reply with message. Again, click on the blue highlighted text ‘message’ in the third box. Browse until you find the message you prepared earlier - remember to change the Files of type to text (.txt). Select the file you want customers to receive in reply, click Open and then OK twice. Job done. Links in this story | |