Copyright © 2001, William Weiland
Contact your customers a few days or weeks after they've purchased products at your store with an automatically generated "stock" email. This module captures pertinent order information and uses it for generating a follow-on email. This gives you an opportunity to guage customer satisfaction with your store.
1) In admin, click Add Modules
2) Click the file upload button
3) Browse to find the followon.mv (followon.mvc compiled) file on your hard drive and upload
4) Click Add to add it to the domain
5) Click the image to the left of your store name
6) Click on the Order Fulfillment Configuration link
7) Check the box to the left of Follow-on Contact and select Update
8) Click on Add Modules again
9) Click the file upload button
10) Browse to find the cim_log.mv (cim_log.mvc compiled) file on your hard drive and upload
11) Click Add to add it to the domain
12) Click the image to the left of your store name
13) Click on the Logging Configuration link
14) Check the box to the left of CIM Activity Log and select Update
In the Fulfillment Configuration screen you will enter several items. One of them is which screen you will have the program "flush" pending emails. When a customer browses your store, at the end of a particular screen load, merchant will flush the pending emails if the last digit of the seconds (time) is a zero. Thus, about every 10th display of the screen you choose, Merchant will flush the next batch of pending emails. It will only flush five at a time or no more than a 15 second delay. I have found that the delay is probably less than a second to flush emails to the server send mail spool. I also think the Product (PROD) screen is the best location to include the "flush". If your customers rarely visit that screen, you may need to pick a different screen. If your store is made of static html pages and you are not using the regular Merchant screens, this module is not going to work for you.
In the compiled version (Merchant 4.14 or newer) you may decide not to send the generic email to all customers. If you put the pound character (#) at the very beginning of the email body input, the generic emails will not be sent. In this scenario you are probably using the module to send the product specific follow-on emails (see next paragraph). If you are using our Coupon Redemption module you can embed a token to produce a unique coupon code for each individual email. You may find this useful for marketing and promoting revisits and new sales. See the example email for coupon generation with a token.
In the individual product edit screen you will see a tab (link) for the Follow-on Contact. You can create one or two follow-on emails for each product in your inventory. When an order contains a product with follow-on emails assigned, a record is added to the follow-on email queue. When the due date arrives to send the email, if the body of the follow-on email is not empty, the email will be sent. Like the generic email, you can add a coupon token to the product specific emails. These emails are usually used to promote another product at a specific time frame or to encourage a repeat or maintenance sale for the original product. You can have two product specific emails in addition to the generic email, for a total of three follow-on emails to increase sales and enhance marketing.
You may want to test this module by sending all of the follow-on emails to you until you are sure you have them the way you want them to look.
Compiled Merchant: Check the box for test mode.
Uncompile Merchant: Scroll down to line 298. There you will see two lines related to the variable for the "to" address. One is commented out using the double # characters. If you swap them so that the "to" address takes its assignment from the "from" address (the other line), the emails will go to the from address. When you are comfortable that all is well, you can the switch the addresses to send to the customer's actual address.