Categories
Updates

Associating Products to Email Templates – Include/Exclude!

Another new update to the website is a bit of a rewrite to how Products are associated to templates.

As a reminder, inside each email template you need to specify which of your products this template will be associated with, or say that it is for all your products.

We’ve now changed the functionality slightly.

Including Products

First, there is a new way of picking the products you want. Instead of the old picker there is a new dropdown that let’s you filter on ASIN, SKU or Product Title. Simply type any characters from the ASIN, SKU or Product Title into the dropdown and it will filter on those.

You can select all matches by clicking the [Select All] checkbox.

Excluding Products

Perhaps the biggest change is that now you can say which products you DON’T want the template to apply to. Sometimes you have 1000 items and want it to go to all except 2. Before that was a real pain in the butt. Now, hopefully not so much.

The same powerful ASIN, SKU and Product Title filtering is available here too.

Please Note: This is an either/or situation. You can either exclude products or include products. You cannot exclude some AND include some.

All Products

Finally, instead of the old switch you now select All Products from the same drop down menu.

Categories
Updates

More Information At A Glance – Email Templates

We are going through the website and making some updates! Yeah! Finally!

On the Email Templates listings page we’ve given you more direct visibility of some stats and also more direct access to some functions.

Quick Stats

Now right from the email listings you can see your 3 most important stats.

  1. Number of emails queued or sent – let’s you know if the template is going out!
  2. Number of emails queued – quick look at how many upcoming emails we’ve got for this template
  3. Open rate – what percentage of people are reading this?

As always, if your open rate is 0 for ALL your templates, even those with a lot of sends, then you most likely have a problem with your configuration and you should read this article on the support portal.

Quick Actions

I know. It’s a pain that we made you open the email template first, then click on things like “Show Sending Details” and especially “Edit”! So now you can do these things directly from the listings.

  1. Edit
  2. Preview
  3. Sending Details/Queue
  4. Duplicate

You STILL need to go into the template to:

  1. Force Send
  2. Delete
Categories
News FAQ

Yes – we’re GDPR Compliant!

We decided NOT to spam you with this, but, we are getting some requests.

Zonmaster has updated the Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy to hilight that we are GDPR compliant. Your data – and the data of your customers – is stored in an encrypted format in our database. We have processes in place to delete data upon request.

The gathering of your customer’s data from Amazon is covered by Amazon’s “contract” with the customers (and your MWS contract with Amazon),

Happy selling!

Categories
News

Amazon Buyer Opt-Out in All Marketplaces

Last year Amazon implemented a scheme on Amazon.com whereby buyers could opt out of receiving emails from sellers. This feature has now been rolled out across the entire Amazon ecosystem, meaning that now buyers from Europe and India, as well as North America, can now choose to no longer receive “non-critical” emails from sellers.

The “[Important]” Hack is Gone

When Amazon rolled the Buyer Opt-out feature to a wider audience they also removed a backdoor that had been used to get around it. You used to be able to put “[Important]” in the subject line of an email and it would get through to buyers, even those who had opted-out. Guess what? People abused it, and now that is gone. The ONLY way the Zonmaster knows of to get an email to an opted-out buyer is via the Seller Central email system directly. It cannot be done via a third party sending, regardless of what other platforms are telling you. Zonmaster has one of the biggest sample sizes in the industry and can say for sure that this does not work any more.

Why it’s Ok

Our numbers show that only around 10% of buyers are choosing to opt out. If they have chosen to not receive emails, then not sending them emails is the right thing to do. If you put a sign on your front door that says “no solicitors” and then people came knocking anyway, would you give them a favorable review? No. You have to think from the perspective of the buyer. YOU as a seller might think your message is important. The buyer might not. Sorry.

Managing Opt-Outs

We’ve got an article over here that explains what to do. Essentially you forward your opt-out notification messages to us at the special email we tell you about on your control panel on Zonmaster. We will then add the buyers to your “opted out” list – and also to our Global Opt-Out List. When a buyer opts out of an email sent through Zonmaster, that email address is removed from all future Zonmaster-generated messages from our entire network of users.

Categories
News

Amazon Messaging Changes – Jan 2018

[UPDATE]: We have resolved the issues with “Message without Contents”. There is still an issue with tracking email opens. We are developing a new technology for this and we’ll post here once it is released!

[UPDATE]: Email Opens are again being tracked!

——

Amazon is up to their old tricks again! Another new rollout has caused issues for all contact done through Seller Central (this is not just a Zonmaster issue).

We are seeing the following:

  1. Bugs in the Seller Central message center shows “Message without contents” – by switching to the old message interface (there is a link at the top middle of the messages page) you can see the real message.
  2. Removal of the Zonmaster tracking pixel. For now, our “Open Rate” stats are off because of this
  3. Removal of links – even to Amazon pages – that only have an image as the link element (i.e. you don’t have text inside your link)
  4. They rolled out the Customer Opt-out to non-US marketplaces. Now all customers can opt out of getting emails from sellers.
  5. Adding “[Important]” to a message no longer gets around the opt-out. I’m guessing this is because most sellers just kept on pumping out messages and putting Important in the subject line.

Some people are reporting all links are gone, but we don’t think this is true.

Obviously, these are significant changes that are affecting ALL email/autoresponder services, not just Zonmaster.

We are actively working on solutions or workarounds, as well as building out other features inside of Zonmaster.

Categories
News

Find Your Profit: Unit Costs and Inbound Shipping Costs

At Zonmaster we’re always looking for ways to improve our services to you so that you can get a better handle on your Amazon business. Whether you’re a big or small seller we think you should have access to the same kind of great tools.

As any business person will tell you, know where you’re making money – or loosing money – is vital. So we’re working on giving you better financial tools. The first step is to show you true profit on your orders. On your orders now you should see additional information that shows you fees.

Zonmaster Showing Amazon Fees On Orders

As you can see, there is a space for  Unit Costs and Inbound Costs. This information can only come from you, the seller. So, if you zip over to your items you can now see a space to enter that info. (For fun we also show some additional info about the item if it is FBA).

Zonmaster Enter Unit And Inbound Costs
Enter Your Unit And Inbound Costs

Clicking on either the Unit or Inbound cost value will bring up a popup. Just enter the value – don’t enter a currency symbol.

 

With that input, if you go back to your orders you’ll see those values populated.

 

We’ll be rolling out a bulk upload tool so you can just send us a CSV file with SKU, Unit Cost and Inbound Cost.

IMPORTANT:  This feature is still in development so some aspects may change. If you use this and experience any issues please let us know. Your feedback is the only way we can improve!

Categories
Updates

Multi-lingual NickNames

We’ve had nicknames for quite some time. Nicknames are essentially custom titles you can give to products for the sake of having something short and sweet in the email and not having the (let’s face it, sometimes ridiculously long!) product title that you have on Amazon.

And now, Zonmaster supports giving an item a different nickname per marketplace.

How To Set It

Go to your items page here (https://www.zonmaster.com/items). Choose an item. This feature works best for those of you selling in Europe, where you have lots of marketplaces for a single item.

You’ll see something like this.

You can now click on the flags to show you the details for each marketplace. Notice that there is a “Nickname” field now in the right hand block. You can click on the word “Empty” and a popup entry field will display, where you can enter in a shortened (or whatever) nickname that will only be used for this marketplace (in this example, Germany).

 

There is still the old nickname field on the left, underneath the product image. This can be used as a “default” nickname, used when no marketplace specific nickname is entered. You can also use this if you see no need to enter marketplace-specific nicknames.

Categories
Updates

Download a Database of your Customers

For our higher-level customers, we offer the ability to download a CSV file of your customers, their purchases and your interactions with them.

Up until now, this feature has been ‘on request’ only, meaning that you had to email us and we would create the file and email it to you. This was always problematic (as those of you who requested it know!). Now we finally offer a way for you to do this for yourself!

What it is

A CSV file (read about it here) is a way for you to get your data and import it into a spreadsheet of your choice (like Excel). The Zonmaster CSV file contains all your customer info – name, address, Amazon customer email, etc – but also their order numbers, reviews and feedback. It also includes what emails you’ve sent them.

How to get it

[EDIT: The location was moved!] Go to your subscription info page: https://www.zonmaster.com/customers.

Zonmaster allows you to download your customer data

A little down the page you’ll see a section called ‘Download Your Data’. If you’re on the Zonmaster Plan (or higher) the ‘Request Customer CSV’ button will be active. By clicking it you’ll start a process where our servers will create the CSV file. Then we’ll automatically email you when it’s ready with a link to download it.

You can request a download a maximum of once every 7 days. The CSV file will contain data from the last 90 days.

Please let us know if you have any issues with this new feature.

Of course, it’s up to you to use this data responsibly!

Categories
News Instruction

Finally! A/B Testing arrives to ZonMaster

A/B Split Testing now available on ZonMaster

I know, I know! You’ve been asking for a way to do split testing for some time! Finally we have the first stage of our solution in place.

What It Is

You can set a template to go out to all orders or to odd numbered orders or even numbered orders. Amazon pretty much splits these order numbers 50/50 and we’ve done a lot of testing – this does seem to be a good way to do the splitting. By sending one template to odd numbered orders and another to even numbered orders you can see which is more effective.

Split testing (also referred to as A/B testing or multivariate testing) is a method of conducting controlled, randomized experiments with the goal of improving a website metric, such as clicks, form completions, or purchases. Incoming traffic to the website is distributed between the original (control) and the different variations without any of the visitors knowing that they are part of an experiment. The tester waits for a statistically significant difference in behavior to emerge. The results from each variation are compared to determine which version showed the greatest improvement.

How To Use It

What we recommend is to set up two almost identical templates (you can duplicate a template by using the ‘Clone’ button when you’re viewing a template). Set one of the templates to be an ‘A’ template and the other to be a ‘B’ template.

Then change something like the subject line. Changing the subject line in one template and leaving the other alone will, then looking at the open rates, will let you see which subject line is more affective.

Or leave the subject line and change the call to action in the content of the email.

Change only 1 thing between emails – otherwise you don’t know what caused the difference results!

Where to set it

The ‘A/B Selector’ is available while editing a template.

Categories
Updates

Automatic Blacklisting

Over the past few days we’ve been sneaking out some new features. One of them is Automatic Blacklisting of Customers.

What it does

A few of you have asked for this – some way of automatically blacklisting customers in certain situations so you don’t have to worry about them getting ‘canned’ emails that might not be appropriate. Now you can do that. We offer four options: to blacklist the customer when they’ve:

  • Gotten a refund
  • Returned an item
  • Left a negative review
  • Left negative seller feedback

Once you make the setting that customer will never get another email from you via ZonMaster!

Where to find it

These settings apply to each Amazon Merchant account (‘store’ in ZonMaster-speak). So go to your stores listing page here. Then select each store. You’ll see a section on that page similar to the one at the top of this blog post where you can make each setting.

Use Caution

Be aware that by blacklisting a customer they will never get another email via ZonMaster – even if they make a new purchase. This may not be what you want. We do also have the ability to stop sending on an order (go to an orders page and click the ‘Stop Sending for this Order’ button), and of course on every template you can choose one or many ‘Stop On’ options. So you’ve got lots of choices.