Invitation Email

lotsofbricks

Hi. Now that I'm off of eBay and selling solely on Brick Owl, I would like a way to send a nice looking email message to my former customers inviting them to my store here. I would like to recommend a feature here to send an invitation message to an email address that I enter. Perhaps It can even include a personal message or a way to add a coupon code to the message.

Ron

SuperBrick

I think it would be a bad idea to be able to use Brick Owl to send unsolicited emails to offer it services to people who have not signed up for this site. When I receive these type of messages I mark them as spam. I suspect many other would do the same thing which could have a negative impact on the delivery of other email originating from Brick Owl.

If you want to send these messages from your personal account that is quite different since you would be informing your customers that you have changed 'locations'.

johnsma2000

I think that this should not be available through Brick Owl. If you have customers that have opted in to email/newsletters from you there are already separate mechanisms to contact them. Constant Contact is one available avenue geared specifically for this purpose.

Unless I have Opted in to receive email/newsletters from a seller I mark them spam when received unsolicited.

-1

Teup

You can actually send messages to e-mail addresses, and you can attach a coupon code. It is called e-mail :P I don't see why that should be a feature embedded within BO.

However, a store mail list for people to sign up for could be a neat feature (if it isn't already there?). After all, that's a feature of BL as well. I don't use it a lot, but occassionaly I do.

lotsofbricks

Ok, not a popular idea. I was only thinking about how some other sites (in general, not Lego related) allow users to send invitations to others. My reasoning was to be able to have a professional looking message that would appear to be sent by the person, not the site.

If only we could vote for politicians in the same way as messages on the forum. LOL we would elect anyone who's vote score was above 0.

Markyd7

Don't take it personally. I think we've all had to much spam emails!

Don't think it would work for politicians, they would all have negative scores!
We'd end up with some Z list celebrity or Jeremy Clarkson running the country!

robernat

Also nothing personal, but please no. This kind of thing would lead to potential abuse, particulary if this would be done with e-mails from buyers on competitor site(s). Don't think they would appreciate seeing their members being 'spammed' with messages comming from their 'competition', even if it's a 'user' who sends the mail, it would still come with BO identifiable data somehow. Use regular e-mail as others stated.

Teup

Well, I do think you're on to something. Like I said, the ability to send out store mailings through the site is rather neat on BL. It'd be nice if that'd be implemented here. So not the ability to mail whoever you want, but the ability to send out a mailing to the customers who have signed up for it.

Hoddie

One of the biggest problems with mailing lists is that it can impact on future email. Say a customer signs up for your mailing list but then later regrets having done so. Rather than simply unsubscribing, which would likely mean they had to come here, log in and find the option, they simply click "mark as spam" on their email client. Some email services, such as Gmail, if they get enough of these reports from various people, begin to assume that all email related to a particular domain is spam. This potentially means that things like order email and message notification email are automatically directed to the spam folders, or worse (like with AOL), aren't even sent to the user in the first place.

Besides which, there'd be a need to ensure that all mailings met relevant legislation which can differ country by country. This could be costly.