ebay's Email Marketing Tools
eBay provides a useful little tool that allows you to send attractive e-mails to your customers.
eBay Stores can send a certain number of e-mails for free each month:
■ Basic Store 400 e-mails/month
■ Featured Store 1,000 e-mails/month
■ Anchor Store 4,000 e-mails/month
If you go over your limit, you’ll pay 1 cent per e-mail—so a Basic Store that sends 10,000
e-mails a month would pay $96.
Creating an e-mail is quite straightforward since eBay provides a tool that automates the
process. More of the problem derives from getting the various e-mail addresses to send to in the
first place.
The big question is then: Who do you send e-mails to? eBay does provide tools to create and
manage various mailing lists. In fact, you can create up to five different groups—perhaps one for
a Monthly Newsletter, one for New Products, one for people who have subscribed to your Special
Offer Bulletin, and so on. But how do you get e-mails into this list?
There’s an e-mail list subscription tool built into the Favorites page. Visitors to your store
can subscribe to one or more of your lists at the same time they set you as a Favorite store, or
they can sign up without adding you to their Favorites just by clearing the Add to my Favorite
Sellers Top Picks check box. Of course you have to let people know this, because it isn’t widely
known. So here’s how to use this feature.
1. In your My eBay page, click the Manage Your Store link in the My Subscriptions box.
2. In the Manage Your Store page, click the Email Marketing link in the Promotions
column.
3. Click the Mailing Lists link, and create up to five different lists.
4. Go to the page where you want to tell people about your mailing lists—for instance,
you’ll probably want to put it into your About Me page. (In the My eBay page, click the
Personal Information link, and then on the About Me line, click the Change link.)
5. Enter some text promoting your newsletters, and include a link to the Favorites page.
You have to add this link as HTML. |
