There was a new software product at eBay Live! which has the potential significantly increase sales from exisiting customers and that’s why Sales in a Click gets my vote for the best new software product at the show.
Sales in a Click is eBay email marketing taken to a whole new level. It imports professionally written editorial from a choice of over 100 topics and displays it alongside your shop categories combined with featured products selected from your eBay shop.
If you want to change the suggested editorial or select different product from your eBay shop it’s just a couple of mouse clicks. You’ll never need to write your own email marketing content again, unless you want to. Sales in a Click then send the email to your eBay shop subscribers, producing a piece of marketing which is incomparably better than eBay’s standard template.
The ability to send professionally written relevant email marketing is something that eBay has been lacking for years, and it’s been a source of frustration to me that they’ve made it so difficult to customise the email layout. Sales in a Click solves this but best of all it’s easy to create the emails in just a couple of minutes.
Cost for the service is just $6.95 (~£3.50) a month for your first 250 customers and 2 cents (~£0.01) for each additional customer. The service also tracks how profitable your email marketing is, tracking the number of buyers who make a purchase and the total revenue generated from your email marketing.
Currently the service is only available for eBay ProStores in the US, but it’ll be released for eBay shops in the near future. This is one service I’ll be signing up for as soon as it’s available for eBay – it’s email marketing on steroids.
4 Responses
Interesting idea. But did eBay approve this? It seems that they are in violation of the eBay spam rules even if they claim they satisfy US laws on CAN/Spam.
https://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/rfe-spam-ov.html
Which states:
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Spam is not permitted on eBay.
Spam is email or Skype messaging that is both unsolicited and commercial in nature.
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eBay says it must be solicited meaning the buyer must have said yes or opted-in. But the Sales In A Click site says it doesn’t have to be expressly solicited and no express buyer opt-in is needed. In fact, they say if a buyer just asks you a question you can spam them and it implies that if a buyer bids you can spam them. Can you help us find out which one is right? Sales In A Click says this:
https://www.salesinaclick.com/emailpolicy.cfm
“This requires that publishers who make use of our service only distribute e-mail to persons or organizations who have explicitly requested it, or with which they have a pre-existing personal or business relationship that can be verified. For example, customer purchases, organization membership, or requests for information would be valid connections. Correspondence that is relevant and contextual to an original relationship is also acceptable.”
I wWould really like to know the answer before risking getting kicked-off eBay.
PS: I really loved the UBS paypal swipe thing at eBay live as best in show.
Caroline
Caroline – it says “Sales in a Click then send the email to your eBay shop subscribers,”
Inferring it is to opt-ins only
Also, there is an ‘eBay legal’ way to send customised emails to each bidder/buyer which is classed as non commercial (non spam) which also gives them an opt in option to receive promotion emails from sellers, those emails are outside of the eBay system.
That was my very first question – how do they obtain the email addresses to send the marketing mails to. The answer is they integrate with eBay closely and only send emails to people that have specifically subscribed up to your eBay shop email marketing lists.
You and I can’t even see the email addresses of our own subscribers, but they are working with eBay to be able to send mail directly to the subscribers email addresses in a similar way that when you send email marketing through eBay it generates a email in their inbox.
As for the subscribe/unsubscribe – that’s all handled by eBay and if someone wants to unsubscribe from your eBay shop it’s simple for them to do so 🙂
(That relates specifically to email marketing on eBay BTW – not to Sales in a Click’s other services)
Great comments. I wanted to clarify that currently Sales in a Click is only compatible with ProStores. Our friends at Sales in a Click are discussing developing a version that would work with eBay Stores – and rest assured at that time it would be done in a way that complies with eBay’s email policies.
Here’s some additional background on the current version of Sales in a Click.
We worked closely with IMN on this project and are pleased to have IMN and its Sales in a Click service as an addition to our growing list of ProStores-compatible add-on tools.
Sales in a Click is indeed fully compliant with the CAN-SPAM Act, which bans false or misleading header information, prohibits deceptive subject lines and most importantly, requires that email give recipients an opt-out method.
The basis for sending Sales in a Click email is the pre-existing business relationship that merchants have with their customers. After the initial communication, consistent with the CAN-SPAM Act, customers can easily opt-out of the communication with a single click. Also, as part of CAN-SPAM compliance, Sales in a Click does all the list management including handling of the opt-outs.
I also want to emphasize that Sales in a Click will only send email to your registered customers – not those who may have chosen to check out anonymously if you offer that option on your ProStores Web store. An email newsletter is actually a great incentive to get people to register when they make a purchase – let them know that you will send them special offers, info on new products, and other promotions from time to time.
And as always, great content is the key to customer perception of email. Opt-out rates with Sales in a Click are averaging less than 1%, primarily due to the automatically included, relevant editorial content that customers enjoy reading.
Lin Shearer
ProStores