Email mailroom

I’ve been selling scores of books on Amazon lately, and I’ve got a bit different approach than many.

When I order a used book from Amazon, usually I don’t get anything other than Amazon’s automated response. Then, an agonizing amount of time later, I get the book. That’s OK, I suppose. They are a lot cheaper, and most people selling books aren’t professionals.

But, you see I’ve been reading the very excellent book, “Call to Action: Secret Formulas to Improve Online Results” (Bryan Eisenberg, Jeffery Eisenberg), and I know better. Silence is no way to treat customers, and even if my customers aren’t really likely to become repeat customers it is still a good habit and state of mind to treat them well.

I’m treating my whole Amazon experiment as a chance to learn how to sell, how to package and ship, and how to do basic accounting for it all. It’s kind of a trial run for the clothing store I’ll be opening soon.

Yeah, that’s nice, what’s the point?

One of the things I’m doing to distinguish myself as a seller is to always follow up after I’ve shipped. That means I need to write up to a dozen response emails a day. I want to be efficient, obviously, yet I don’t want to just use the interface from my shipping software, Endicia to mail my customers. That’s too impersonal.

I’ve settled on using MailTemplate for OSX Mail.app. Using it, I simply made a responder template. After I ship a book, I right click on the order message, select “respond with mail template | shipped your book”, update the subject line, and I’m done. Easy, fast, and personalized.