Mail Management

English forums
1

Hello all,

A good amount of communication between Merchant and Buyer on an e-Commerce site happens over email, in all phases of the sale (pre, post and during sale).

However this communication is currently done mostly offline, in private mailboxes. The merchant has to switch context between shop (where order/sale and user details are stored) and his own mailbox.

In addition, the mail threads are scattered. So same customer, same order, could result in multiple threads, hence having a disorganized effect on the customer-relationship.

So fine, we can implement a module which allows for all customer communication to be driven from the /admin/ itself. Mail-system sync can be accomplished via simple pop3 or imap protocols. Tracking codes in message-subject can help to maintain threads.

The real challenge seems to me though of storage. If we maintain the emails in the shop-database, wouldn’t we be slowing the DB-Server down? How should the mail-storage best be managed?

  • Would you use the shop-database?
  • Not handle mail correspondence in the mail at all? (easy way out, chicken;))
  • Use a different database (if so, which type?)

Your insights appreciated.

Regards
Ashant

2

In my opinion this should be kept completely independent. The mail/CRM app should collect data from shop and not vice versa. I made something like this several years ago, and would not do it again. It is almost impossible to implement all existing standards, and there are always problems with encoding, charsets, attachments, signatures and so on. I would rather try to use some existing application.

3

True - devil is in the detail.

And that would have been my next question, if apps exist that suit the purpose.

Thanks
Ashant

Opensource OXID Module(s) - modstore.io

4

Wrote down my personal thoughts about this a plenty of time before:
http://www.marco-steinhaeuser.de/technical-facts-about-newsletter-distribution-for-online-merchants.html

Hope you like it.

5

The key features in an integrated OXID + Mail-Management system would be:

  • Couponing
  • ??

However, a higher level of mail-automation (field of “Marketing Automation”), could demand more interesting features:

  • Extract sale products (or any product) from OXID db and list them as content snippets in CRM for content manager to use in her NL
  • User-segmentation
  • Data cleaning (salutations, bounces?)
  • ??

Also, we should differentiate betw. Marketing Automation and CRM.

Btw: Has anyone attempted OXID + SugarCRM?

Regards
Ashant

6

Maybe this is interesting: http://greyhound-software.com/OXID_eShop

7

Danke @leofonic. Greyhound ist eine gute Email-Support Lösung.

Ich denke breiter (oder gar anderen Zweck), NL-Kampagnen, Zielgruppe-Targeting, Couponing.

Danke
Ashant

Opensource OXID Module - modstore.io