Australia’s new data retention laws start today, and this means that ISPs are obliged to collect and keep records about your digital activities for 2 years, and to make those records available to various government agencies on demand without the need for any warrants or legal oversight.

The good news is that the email services provided by Spiffy Stores and Domain Hosting Shop are not subject to these data retention laws. In basic terms, the law only applies to carriage service providers, which means anyone who provides the physical connection for your home or office to the Internet or telephone system.

We will keep your Spiffy Stores email safe and secure, and you can send and receive email secure in the knowledge that the messages will not be archived and retained in any way, and will not be available to any government agency.

It’s tough I know, but most of your web visitors won’t buy on the first visit.

They’ll check you out, flick through your products, perhaps compare prices, scroll through your blog and then they’ll be off again. Like ships in the night.

If you’re lucky, they might bookmark your site for a later date, but mostly they will disappear and get on with their busy lives. And bang goes all that time, cost and effort it took to drive them to your store in the first place. Grrrr.

But you can do something to improve your chances of a revisit. If you make it easy for interested visitors to stay in touch with you, they can get to know you a lot better and you can be there when they need you. With a simple but planned communication strategy, these strangers can become brand friends, and friends can become customers.

Be visibly sociable

One way to encourage visitors to stay in touch is to install ‘follow me’ buttons to your social media accounts (twitter, facebook and Pinterest etc) on your web pages. Social media is a great channel for offering followers useful information, special deals and even customer service assistance, thereby creating trust and a bond with your brand. Pretty much all of our themes include social media links, and these can be enabled in the “Design & assets -> Theme editor” section of your store’s Toolbox.

Email still rocks

Even better, add a simple sign up form on your website to collect email addresses from interested visitors. Some themes have this built-in, but if you use MailChimp or Campaign Monitor, you can use a “Web Hook” to add people who’ve ordered in your store to your mailing list.

Despite the rise of social media, email is still a reliable and cost effective way to keep potential customers informed, deepen your relationship with your subscribers and remind them what you offer.

But you must get their permission to begin emailing them and a sign up form on your website is the way to go. If they are not already a customer, they must have ‘opted-in’ to receive your communications as this is a requirement of the Spam Act.

Be prepared – plan your calendar

Once you start to collect subscribers, you’ll need to plan a calendar for your emails. This way you’ll know what you want to prepare, to whom, and when. The top reasons people will unsubscribe from your emails are;
1. too frequent emails, or
2. irrelevant content.
…so don’t be too zealous with your communications, and only email information or offers that make sense to the recipient.

Start by plotting out ‘shopping’ events that you want to promote like a new fashion season, Christmas and Mother’s day. Then fill in other regular communications like a regular newsletter. There will always be new opportunities so leave some breathing space in your calendar. That way you can send out announcements like a new product or special offer or tie in a promotion with some topical trend or news story.

One last word on email lists here. Don’t be tempted to buy or rent a list of email addresses. It’s inefficient, irritating to the recipients and contravenes the Spam Act. Grow your opt-in list over time with people ho have a genuine interest. Quality over quantity.

In another post soon I’ll provide be a tips sheet on creating killer emails to drive traffic to your online store. Don’t miss it!

Related articles

• Tips for online retailers: How to optimise your store for search engines (part two)
• Tips for online retailers: How to optimise your store for search engines (part one)
• Tips for online retailers: How to choose the right keywords for your online store

We’ve just released a bunch of new features, and this is the first of a series of blog entries to let you know about the changes.

As you’re probably aware, email marketing is an important part of  running an ecommerce site. At Spiffy Stores we’re always on the lookout to find new and better ways to help you run and promote your online store.

The first of these changes is a feature to help you create an email marketing mailing list. To recognize the importance of Email marketing, we’ve added a whole new section under “Marketing” in your store toolbox for the subject.

You now have the option of enabling an additional option to ask the customer whether they would like to be added to your mailing list at checkout time.  This option takes the form of a check box and a message that appears on the second checkout page of your online store.

You can enable this option and choose whether to have the option ticked or unticked by default. You can also change the default text that appears, and replace it with your own text.

If the customer agrees to accept email marketing, this fact will be recorded in a new customer record that we’ve created for email marketing purposes. If the customer places another order in your online store at a later date and doesn’t agree to accept email marketing, then their most recent choice will be recorded as the default for that customer.

Once you have some customers who have agreed, you will see a section in the side-bar of the “Email marketing” page where you can download a CSV file of all the customers who have agreed to receive email marketing. You can use this file to import into an email mailing list manager, such as MailChimp or Campaign Monitor.

This marketing page also includes some well known Email marketing service providers, and we include links to their sites so that you can signup for an account if you’re interested.

Finally, at the bottom of the page is some information about Web Hooks, which is another of our new features.

Stay tuned for another blog entry on how to use Web Hooks to automate stuff and link to external services. We’ll also give you all the information you need to link up your Spiffy Store to MailChimp or Campaign Monitor and have new email addresses added to these services automatically.

We recently enabled a small security enhancement to the Spiffy Stores software to prevent a security attack called Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF).

Basically, now an encrypted token is generated and inserted into every form on the store web pages. This prevents a hacker from copying a form from the site and tricking you into executing the form from a fake site, thus giving the hacker access to your account.

Whilst it was extremely unlikely that this sort of attack would work because of the way in which the Spiffy Stores software is designed, it never hurts to improve security wherever possible.

However, it turns out to have an unintended bonus effect!

Spiffy Stores is one of the few ecommerce solutions that has a “Contact Us” form built into your store. This form is generated for you automatically and you don’t need to use a third-party online form service to get something as essential as a contact form.

Now that we have added the Cross Site Request Forgery code, we are seeing instances of spammers who have “copied” the contact forms from various sites and have built them into scripts to try to spam our store owners with fake contact form submissions. All of these attempts are now failing because they are all detected as forgeries, and this means that your inbox will contain less of the spam generated by these pests.

Every time a customer places an order, they are sent an Order Confirmation email showing them what they’ve ordered.

From time to time, email messages get lost or misplaced. Now you can resend a lost Order Notification to the customer from the Order page. Just go to the order and you’ll find a new link called “Email Order Notification”.

Just click on the link to resend the lost Order Notification.