Eye catching deals and lavish marketing campaigns aren’t the only ways to win the attention of your target market.

Effective communication between you and your customers can be just as effective at making an impression and winning their custom. For merchants, email should form a key part of customer communications.

Trader’s email integration can you help to deliver exactly that.

What do we mean by email integration?

When a new trade customer opens an account with a merchant, you can store their email address in your system. Beyond that, you can create and send emails (with attached documents) to customers directly within the Trader itself, that links directly to your external email client like Gmail or Outlook.

How does email integration work in Trader?

During the registration process, your new trade customers can choose to supply an email address. You should ask for permission to use it in two different ways: first, to send across documents relating to their account and orders; second, to send marketing communications about sales or offers.

As long as you’ve received their permission, you can then begin to email them from within their personal record itself. In practice, most of your customer emails will contain documents such as statements, invoices and quotations. These electronic documents can be sent across instead of, or in addition to, paper copies.

You can also use the email integration to send across marketing emails that highlight discounts, special offers and promotions.

A third way to use email within Trader is simply to keep in touch with customers. You could update them when a product they’re after is in stock and ready for collection, or check-in on the status of a project and ask if they’d like you to reserve any stock for them. Of course, some customers will prefer to receive as few emails as possible, but others may appreciate being contacted more frequently.

The benefits of email integration

Trader makes it far easier to communicate with your clients via email. This removes a major barrier to using email in-store, particularly when you’re serving the customer in-store.

It takes only seconds to create, attach, and send an invoice or quotation via email - no copying and pasting, no digging through contact lists.

The ease with which emails can be sent means that staff are more likely to utilise this option when serving customers. By increasing the uptake of emailed documents, you’ll start to find significant savings in postage.

With postage costs rising every year or so, it’s in your interest to utilise emails as an alternative means of sending documents.

Email integration also cuts down the amount of paperwork involved in processing invoices and other documents, saving you time in-store whilst reducing the errors that inevitably crop up when sending hundreds of documents via post each week.

Ultimately, the benefits of email integration are dependent on customer uptake, but by merely offering clients the option of having documents sent via email, you may impress a few customers!