Many people do NOT craft email responses very well simply because they don't know what is, or isn't acceptable. They will click reply, and start typing at the bottom of the email. This is NOT correct. Don't make the customer scroll through their entire original message, to find your response at the bottom. It's rather unprofessional.

We have provided numerous screen shots below, to show you how to take an incoming email message, and respond to it, properly.

Here is an example email, which you will receive quite frequently. Many people are wary of buying products online, especially from a company that is new to them, therefore, when they receive a password that they can't get to work, they usually panic thinking they've been scammed, and send a letter quite similar to the one below.

As you can see from above, this person provided NO information that will be helpful to you, in quickly resolving their problem. They are upset, and want an immediate response, but failed to provide helpful information, that may enable to you to assist them, without having to spend time figuring out:

• Who they are
• What product they bought
• What their login information is
• What login link they were using
• What exactly happened when they tried to login

Few customers provide information, so you must look it up, and then respond, as fast as you can, with assistance. If you sell more than one product, you need to know which one they bought, before you can help them. Don't rely on the customer to provide this information, and unless it can't be helped, don't be lazy, and email them back asking them to provide it. If they've already bought something from your company, you should know exactly what that was!

At this time, we do not know who this person is. His name is Joe. That is all we know. So, we take his email address (joe@whatever.com), and use our FIND function in Eudora, to get a copy of his Order Confirmation, or any other past correspondence, which WILL provide the info we need, to proceed.

Make sure your order form is set up to send you a copy of all purchase confirmations. You WILL need them in the future, for a situation like this. Because we receive an email notification each time a customer buys a product, we have a product purchase history for everyone, and we use this all the time!

Here is how to use the FIND function.

1) Click on EDIT, then from the list choose "FIND", as shown below:

Once you have clicked "FIND MESSAGES", you will see something similar to the following.

You must select the mailboxes where you think any helpful correspondence will be, (or just select the first checkbox, to search all accounts), then, type your search keywords into the space on the top right hand side.

For our example, we will search on Joe's email address, because that is all the info we have to use. I really wouldn't want to search on "Joe", because there will be too many results found.

Once you've entered your search keywords, you can then click "Search", as shown above.

If any results are found, it will bring them up, in the window, like this:

The results will be displayed in the box showing above. You can see that an outgoing letter was sent to this person in the past, in regards to a duplicate charge.

In real life, I would have much more past email than this, such as the "Order Confirmation", their "forwarded mail" indicating they've been added to our autoresponder, and much more. For our example, we are showing only one past contact, but there are really much more than that.

If you're using the GetResponse autoresponder system, you can change the settings so that you receive a single report from each person that emails your responder address, or daily/weekly report of the same. We use the single report, so as soon as Joe's order went through, we know it, because the order form is set to forward the letter to the responder adding them to the sequence, which then sends a copy to us!

More on the use of autoresponders is provided later!

The old email we managed to find in Eudora tells us that Joe bought one of our products, but was accidentally double billed. Since the letter we found is my response to him regarding the duplicate order he accidentally processed, it says inside which product he bought, and the date his order was processed because when I originally emailed him, I ADDED that information there, on purpose.

The reason for including that information in a reply is twofold. First, Joe receives an email telling him his purchase of XXX , on XX date was refunded in the amount of $XX. Since the letter went through the outbox, we have a copy of it there, forever.

Now that we have the name of the product Joe bought, I can then search our password files, and locate his login information!

Once we have his password, we can test it for errors, and either help him login with what he was originally issued, or provide him with a new one. (Usually it's always easier to provide a new one, especially if the first one was difficult to enter.)

If you have a password protected site, and are issuing a unique password to everyone, make sure to program it, so that no lowercase "i" or "l" are used.

Additionally, if the person is reading their email with Arial fonts, the i's and l's look very much the same. The same rule goes for the number 0, or the letter O. Don't use those characters, and you will prevent a lot of login problems! Your programmer should be able to deny those characters from being issued!