Every now and then someone will ask me “How do I manage so many email address for so many different sites?” Building a good email flow sounds terribly complicated. I admit, it did to me too and for a long time I procrastinated on it.
Over the past 12 months, I spent considerable amount of time devising a smooth, workable infrastructure for the company’s customer support email flow. Best thing I ever did. Some parts still need sanding down – that is inevitable. Even the best systems have some rough patches. Overall this has worked out nicely.
Like many Internet Marketers, we have several websites. We started off with each one having its own email address with its own POP3 account. As you can imagine that quickly got out of hand.
So we started re-directing everything into one or two email address but it was still problematic because we’d mess up on the reply emails and overall it was difficult to sort out how much mail came from where. Also, whenever we set up a new site we’d have to create a new email address, remember to forward it and keep track where it was forwarded to. A tangled mess in the back office.
It was time to centralize. We did it in 4 steps. Each step involved a lot of work and sometimes confusion, but they are straight forward steps nonetheless.
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The first thing we did was to set up a help desk system and put it on a domain of its own and used one single email address as the ‘from’ and ‘to’. We tried out several systems but in the end went with Workaholics4Hire because we needed one dedicated customer service agent. They not only provided that person, they provided the help desk system too. One less script for me to
manage. - Then, we went through all our websites’ pages, contact forms, autoresponders etc to change those out to one main address above.
- Then we took inventory of all the different email accounts.
- Finally, all mail from the old addresses were channeled into the help desk. This is supposed to be temporary while customers got transitioned into using the help desk system. It also allows us to catch and update the pages we missed.
Now, when building any new site it is so easy for us. No longer do we have to sit and think of a good email address or keep track of that anymore. Our footers are standardized throughout all sites. If anything needs changed it can be changed once and copied over quickly/easily. Yes – it leaves a footprint but that is not a big worry for us because we want people to know who is behind those sites.
